I've been colorizing old family photos. I'm using the eye dropper to match colors, but then I lose texture of the underlying photo, especially clothing when I brush the new color on. Is there a way, other than the clone tool, to change colors and still maintian the original photo textures?
We absolutely can provide suggestions for that. It would be helpful to provide some before and after screenshots of what you are experiencing. The more info and detail the better to help.
Without seeing the image, I'd say to try Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and adjust the sliders. Also try Image>Adjustments>Color Balance. Before doing anything, though, always save the original untouched version somewhere. Duplicate the Background layer and work on that. Then when you have some parts that you like, save and then duplicate that layer and add to it, and so on. You might find that the Hue/Saturation sliders give you the skin tone you want but the rest looks off, so duplicate that layer and erase (with a soft brush) or mask around that area and work on the other areas as needed.
If the texture is being lost and you are using the Brush tool on the original image, what is probably happening is that the brush paints new pixels that replace the old ones. It's like brushing real paint on real wood…the paint can hide the wood texture.
If you haven’t tried this already, it should work better to create a new layer over the original image (using the Layers panel), brush the color on that separate layer, and then blend the color with the original texture using a blending mode such as Color, Overlay, or Darken. If you haven’t used layers or blending modes before, you can read about them in Photoshop by choosing Edit > Search.
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