I was recently asked to modify the colour scheme of an existing set of icons and since I do this infrequently enough I am bound to forget it in next to no time. So here is my little aide memoire on how you go about changing the colour scheme of an icon with the help of the Magic Wand Tool in Photoshop. I have also included all the keyboard shortcuts I used to speed up the process, these appear in brackets.

So open up your image and select your Magic Wand Tool (short cut shift+W) and for this exercise make sure that Tolerance is set to 0 and anti-aliased, Contiguous and Use all Layers are unchecked. Then go to the Image menu option (Alt+i), select Mode (M) and set the Mode to RGB Colour (R). The groud work has been done, now it’s time to choose the new colour scheme. I use the colour switcher, for the purpose here the colours aren’t that important, just the process is, so pick a foreground colour and a background colour. ALT+backspace fills the image area with the foreground colour and CTRL+backspace fills the image area with the background colour. OK, but that’s exactly what we had in mind. We wanted to change the colour scheme of an icon, i.e. change the background colour but leave the image intact and this is where the Magic Wand Tool comes in handy.

1. With the wand tool selected click on the background area to select it.
2. Use CTRL+backspace or ALT+backspace to set the background colour to your selected foreground/background colour selection. You can have additional features for this kind of fill action by doing SHIFT+backspace.
3. Once you are happy with the background you can do the same with the foreground image if you like, by selecting that with your Magic Wand Tool and using the same keystrokes again.
4. Once you are happy, do SHIFT+CTRL+ALT+s to save the image for the web

And you are done, pretty straightforward as with most things in Photoshop once you know how!