Edit parts of an image in Photoshop on iPhone

Adjust color in selected areas of a photo.

Published January 12, 2026

00:01

Introduction

When working in Photoshop on the iPhone, you may find yourself wanting to edit parts of your images, and you can easily do so by using selections and adjustment layers.

I'm Howard Pinsky, and in this video, I'm going to show you how easy it is to edit parts of your images using Photoshop on iPhone.

Here we have an image I'm working on, and I'd love to change up the colors for a fun look.

Let's start by selecting our main object.

00:20

Selecting objects to target specific edits

Tapping on Select area, Photoshop has detected several objects we can immediately add to our selection.

I can either tap on the thumbnails in this list or directly on canvas.

With our object now chosen, tapping the Checkmark will create our first selection and give us a few options at the bottom, including Adjust area.

This will show us various adjustments that we can make to our selected object.

00:45

Adjusting color with hue and saturation

And since we're looking to change color, let's add Hue and Saturation.

Here we can shift the color with the Hue slider, adjust Saturation and Lightness.

I'll now tap the Checkmark at the bottom of the screen to commit the adjustment.

That's looking pretty good, but what I'd love to do now is make the rest of the image black and white.

So, diving back into Select area,

01:13

Inverting selections for black and white effects

I'll once again select the car by tapping on it in the image.

But this time, I'm also going to tap on this Invert button to select everything else in the image.

Now, when I tap on the Checkmark to create the selection, you can see the animated border that represents the selection around everything except the car.

Next, let's do something with this selection.

I'll tap on Adjust area and this time I'm going to choose the Black and white adjustment to give this image a nice, timeless look.

I can also go through the various color sliders here to tweak the various gray tones of particular colors if I'm after a specific look.

For example, if I drag the Yellows slider to the left, everywhere that was yellow gets darker.

You can even add an overall tint to the image at the bottom.

And if you change your mind about the tint or any of these adjustments, just tap the Undo button at the top as many times as you need to.

With our edit looking snazzy, I'll tap on the Checkmark to apply the adjustment.

Next, I'm going to open the detailed layers stack

02:14

Reviewing and editing adjustments in the layers stack

by swiping left on these mini layer thumbnails.

And what you may notice is that both our adjustment layers have been added to the layers stack.

So, at any point in the future, you can jump back into either adjustment layer to make changes.

And that's how you can quickly adjust parts of your images using Photoshop on iPhone.

I'll catch you all in the next one.

What you’ll learn

Change the color of an object

Change the color of a specific object without affecting the rest of the image. Make a selection of the object. Tap Adjust area and then Hue and Saturation, and drag the sliders to change the hue, saturation, and lightness of only the object you selected.

Change a selected area to black and white

You also can change the color of a selected area, like a photo background. A quick way to select a complex background is to select the subject with a tool like Tap Select, and then invert your selection.

With the background selected, change it from color to black and white by tapping Adjust area and then Black and white. Drag the adjustment sliders to fine-tune the look of the black and white background.

Revisit your adjustments

This workflow creates individual adjustment layers that affect the image layer below them. You can see your adjustment layers in the compact layer thumbnails or the detailed layers view. And you can revisit an adjustment layer at any time to change its settings.

Instruction by: Howard Pinsky
Adobe Stock Contributors: Kmiragaya

Try these tutorials with Photoshop

Edit photos to create new images and graphics.

View all plans

Cookie Settings

General information

Cookies are small text files stored by your web browser when you use websites. There are also other technologies that can be used for similar purposes like HTML5 Local Storage and local shared objects, web beacons, and embedded scripts. These technologies help us do things like remembering you and your preferences when you return to our sites, measure how you use the website, conduct market research, and gather information about the ads you see and interact with.

If enabled:

We can improve your experience by tailoring the site and the content to things we think might be of interest
We can better keep track of your preferences — like what language you prefer to use
We will better understand your likely interests so we can provide you more relevant Adobe ads and content on non-Adobe websites and in non-Adobe apps
It will help us improve the performance of our website and those of our partners who use the Adobe Experience Cloud

If disabled:

We won’t be able to remember you from session to session so the experience may not be tailored to your interests
You’ll still have access to the content of the site but certain features that depend on cookies may not function
You’ll still see ads, they just may not be as relevant to you