Selective Color: Change One Colour Without Touching the Rest
Six colour families, each with its own hue, saturation and lightness. The weights sum to exactly one at every hue, so adjusting the reds provably cannot move a pure blue and setting all six the same is identical to one global change.
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Colour family
Each family keeps its own three settings. Switching tabs does not reset anything.
Moves this family toward its neighbours on the wheel without touching the others.
Near-grey pixels have no real hue, so they belong to no family. Raise this if grey areas start shifting colour.
Presets
Your photos are never uploaded. The hue analysis and the adjustment both run inside this browser tab.
People also use
Everything this tool does
A real partition, not six guesses
Each family's influence falls to zero at its neighbours, so exactly two are ever non-zero and they always add to one. Checked across all 360 hues, the six weights sum to 1.000 with no deviation.
One family cannot reach another
Pushing the reds to their extremes leaves a pure blue pixel byte for byte unchanged. That is a consequence of the geometry rather than a tolerance.
Greys stay grey
A near-neutral pixel has a hue that is essentially noise. The gate refuses to assign it a family. On a noisy grey field with the reds at maximum, not one pixel changed.
Eighteen independent settings
Hue, saturation and lightness for each of the six families, all kept when you switch tabs so you can build an adjustment across several colours.
All six together is a global change
Because the weights partition the wheel, setting every family to the same value is mathematically identical to one global adjustment, which is a useful sanity check on the maths.
Drag to compare
Before and after share one frame with a slider, which matters for adjustments this targeted.
Six purpose-built presets
Deepen the sky, richer foliage, warm skin, autumn, calm the blues, and one that lifts all six equally.
Batch with one ZIP
Apply the same colour work across a shoot and take everything as a single archive built in your browser.
Transparency preserved
The alpha channel is untouched for PNG and WebP output.
Nothing is uploaded
No server, no queue, nothing to delete afterwards. Close the tab and every trace of the image goes with it.
What each control does
Six families sit sixty degrees apart around the colour wheel, and every pixel is shared between the two nearest. The three sliders then act on the family you have selected, leaving the others where they are.
| Control | What it does | Try | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hue shift | moves the family along the wheel | -20 to +20 | Fixing a colour that reads wrong |
| Saturation | strengthens or drains that family | -40 to +40 | Making one colour pop |
| Lightness | brightens or darkens that family | -30 to +30 | Separating similar tones |
| Reds | skin, brick, tail lights | small moves | Skin tone correction |
| Yellows | foliage highlights, sand, gold | any | Autumn and warm tones |
| Greens | grass, leaves, foliage | any | Landscape work |
| Blues and cyans | sky, water, shade | any | Deepening skies |
6
colour families
1.000
weights sum, exactly
0
files uploaded
18
independent settings
ZIP
batch download
Free
no account needed
FlipMyFormat vs other selective colour tools
| Capability | FlipMyFormat | Typical free tool |
|---|---|---|
| Files stay in your browser | ||
| Family weights that sum to exactly one | ||
| Adjusting one family provably cannot move another | ||
| Saturation gate so greys stay grey | ||
| All eighteen settings kept when switching family | ||
| Batch ZIP download without paying | ||
| No watermark on the output |
How to change one colour without wrecking the others
Most colour problems in a photograph are local to one hue. The grass is too yellow, the sky is not deep enough, the skin has gone slightly orange, the red jacket is competing with the subject's face. Reaching for a global saturation or white balance control to fix any of those means dragging the entire picture around to solve a problem in one sixth of it, and you will usually break something else in the process. Selective colour exists for exactly this, and the way to use it is narrower than people expect: pick the family, move one slider, look, and stop. The most common mistake is treating it as six saturation sliders and pushing all of them, which is just a global adjustment taken the long way round. The second most common is going straight to hue shift when saturation or lightness was the real answer. If grass looks wrong, ask whether it is the wrong green, too strong a green, or too bright a green, because those are three different fixes and only one of them is the hue slider. The one thing worth knowing about the mechanics is what happens to grey. A pixel that is nearly neutral has a hue in the numbers but not in any meaningful sense, and if you let it be assigned to a family, concrete and cloud and shadow start picking up colour as you work. That is what the gate is for, and if you see neutral areas drifting, raising it is the fix.
- 1
Add your photos
Drag them in, click to browse, or paste with Ctrl+V. Fix white balance first, since a global cast is a different problem from one family being wrong.
- 2
Pick the family, then move one slider
Choose which colour family you want to change and adjust hue, saturation or lightness. The other five are untouched.
- 3
Raise the gate if greys shift, then export
Near-grey pixels have no real hue, so raise the gate if neutral areas start picking up colour. Save individually or as one ZIP.
Six families that share every pixel exactly
Weights that add to one
The six families sit sixty degrees apart around the colour wheel, and each one's influence falls linearly to zero at its two neighbours. That geometry has a useful consequence: for any hue at all, exactly two families are non-zero and their weights always add to one. Every pixel is therefore fully accounted for and never counted twice, which is what separates a real partition from six overlapping ranges tuned by hand. Two things follow that you can rely on. Setting all six families to the same value is mathematically identical to one global adjustment, and adjusting one family cannot reach a hue that belongs entirely to another. We verify both. Sampling 1,440 steps around the wheel, the six weights sum to one with a largest deviation of 1.1e-16, which is floating point noise rather than error, and never more than two are non-zero at once. Pushing the reds to their extremes leaves a pure blue pixel byte for byte unchanged.
Why grey has to be excluded
Hue is calculated from the difference between a pixel's strongest and weakest channel, and when that difference is tiny the resulting angle is essentially noise. A slightly warm grey reports a hue near zero, which puts it squarely in the reds; a slightly cool one lands in the blues. Left unguarded, that means concrete, cloud and shadow drift in colour as soon as you touch any family, and the drift is worse in exactly the areas a viewer expects to be neutral. The gate refuses to assign any family to a pixel below a minimum saturation, so those pixels pass through untouched. We check it on a deliberately noisy grey field with the reds pushed to maximum: with the gate at twelve percent, not one pixel changed.
What people use it for
Deepening skies
Darkening and strengthening the blues is the single most common selective colour edit in landscape work.
Skin tone correction
Small moves on the reds fix skin that has gone too orange or too pink without touching anything else in the frame.
Foliage that looks wrong
Grass photographed in the wrong light often reads yellow. Shifting the greens fixes it without affecting the sky.
Autumn colour
Pushing greens toward yellow turns a summer photograph into an autumn one, which is a common commercial request.
Product colour accuracy
When a product's colour reproduces slightly wrong, adjusting only its family avoids shifting the background with it.
Calming a distracting colour
Draining one family is a gentler alternative to masking out a bright object that competes with the subject.
Brand colour matching
Nudging one family across a set brings photographed products closer to a brand specification.
Food photography
Reds and yellows carry most of the appeal in food images, and they usually need different treatment from each other.
Six tips worth knowing
Pick the family, move one slider, look, and stop. Pushing all six is just a global adjustment taken the long way round.
Ask whether the problem is the wrong hue, too much saturation or the wrong lightness. Those are three different fixes.
If neutral areas start drifting in colour, raise the gate. Near-grey pixels have a hue in the numbers but not in reality.
Fix white balance first. A cast affecting the whole picture is not a selective colour problem.
Reds and yellows overlap on skin, so a skin correction usually needs a small move on both rather than a large one on either.
Use a batch for a shoot. Colour consistency across a series is most of what makes a set look professionally handled.
Troubleshooting
Grey areas changed colour
Near-grey pixels have a hue that is essentially noise. Raise the gate until they stop being assigned to a family.
Another colour moved as well
Neighbouring families share pixels at the boundary between them, which is correct and is what stops a visible edge appearing. A colour halfway between red and yellow legitimately receives some of both.
Nothing happened
The family you selected may not be present in the photo. Check which colours are actually in the image before adjusting.
The result looks banded
Large smooth areas of one hue with a shifted colour is what JPEG bands. Export at quality 90 or above, or use PNG.
Frequently asked questions
What is selective colour?
An adjustment that changes one family of colours without touching the others. You pick reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues or magentas and adjust only that family's hue, saturation and lightness.
How is it different from colour balance?
Colour balance works on tonal ranges: shadows, midtones and highlights. Selective colour works on colour families regardless of brightness. A dark red and a bright red belong to the same family here and to different ranges there.
Can adjusting reds affect my blues?
No. Each family's influence falls to zero at its neighbours, so a pure blue has zero red weight. Pushing the reds to their extremes leaves a pure blue pixel byte for byte unchanged.
Why do the weights need to sum to one?
So every pixel is fully accounted for and never counted twice. It also means setting all six families to the same value is mathematically identical to one global adjustment, which is a good check that the maths is right.
Why did my grey areas change colour?
Hue comes from the difference between a pixel's strongest and weakest channel, and when that difference is tiny the angle is noise. Raise the gate so those pixels are excluded from every family.
How much does the gate need to be?
Around ten to fifteen percent suits most photos. Raise it if neutral areas drift, lower it if genuinely pale colours are being ignored.
A colour between two families changed when I adjusted one
That is correct. An orange sits between red and yellow and legitimately receives some of both, which is what stops a visible edge appearing where one family ends and the next begins.
Should I use hue, saturation or lightness?
Ask what is actually wrong. Grass that is the wrong green needs hue; grass that is too green needs saturation; grass that is too bright needs lightness. Reaching for hue first is the common mistake.
Can I adjust several families at once?
Yes. All eighteen settings are kept independently, so you can move between family tabs and build up an adjustment across several colours.
Should I do this before or after white balance?
After. A cast that affects the whole picture is a white balance problem, and correcting it with six family sliders is possible but far more work than it needs to be.
Why is there no orange family?
Orange sits between red and yellow and receives weight from both, so it is covered by adjusting either or both. Adding a seventh family would break the sixty degree geometry that makes the weights partition exactly.
Nothing changed when I moved the sliders
The family you selected may simply not be present in the photograph. Check which hues the image actually contains first.
Are my photos uploaded to a server?
No. The hue analysis and the adjustment both run in your browser using the canvas API. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Which format should I export?
Keep the original for photographs, at quality 90 or above. Shifting one hue exaggerates the colour artefacts JPEG already introduced around it.
Is transparency preserved?
Yes for PNG and WebP output. The alpha channel is untouched. JPG has no alpha, so transparent areas are filled with the background colour first.
Can I process a batch?
Yes. Add as many photos as you like and the same eighteen settings are applied to each, which is how you keep a shoot consistent.
Is this the same as Photoshop's Selective Color?
The intent is the same, though Photoshop works in CMYK components and includes whites, neutrals and blacks as separate ranges. This works in hue, saturation and lightness, which is more direct for most photographic corrections.
Does it add a watermark or need an account?
No to both. No sign-up, no email wall, no daily limit and no watermark on the output.