I’m here today with a quick little tutorial, a sneak peek at something new that is coming out this weekend AND a little freebie—just for you!

I wanted to show you a little Photoshop secret that has changed my life and saved me a TON of time. It’s a simple trick that helps you change the color of a .png and allows you to use a brush in .png format without ever adding it to your brush collection (because, really—who has that much disc space?!).

Here’s how you can quickly and easily change from black & white…

…into color, like you see above.

Are you ready for it?

Don’t blink—you might miss this. It’s super simple.

You lock the transparent pixels, like so:

Then, simply press BACKSPACE + ALT (for the foreground color) or BACKSPACE + CTRL (for the background color).

It’s that easy!

But what about something a little more complex? What if you want two or more colors, like this?:

You use a clipping mask! Here’s how. First, open up your .png file along with another .png brush file (or a new brush on a second layer).

Here’s our little butterfly, along with a free brush I’ve made, just for you:

Lock the transparent pixels on the new layer to change the color of the new stamp, like so:

Then simply clip this top layer to the bottom layer (using CTRL + G or CTRL + Shift + G, depending on your settings in Photoshop):

Repeat this trick with even more layers and different brushes to get a multicolored image, like the first butterfly above!

I hope you enjoy using this free brush on your next page:

(This brush is only for personal use on digital scrapbooking pages or blog design. Thank you!)

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about this short and sweet little Photoshop trick. I’ll see you back here tomorrow for another Sweet Shoppe Saturday!

Happy Scrapping!

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