I have never had need to change a photo - indeed the thought fills me with dread as I am all thumbs when it comes to playing with IT stuff 
But I have a car that I want to introduce some colour into the interior and brighten up the drab teutonic black. I want to see the options as I think them up.
I know several here are well versed in this sort of thing, so a question please: is there a BASIC EASY TO USE program that will easily and simply change colours of photos pleaseā¦?
Thanks
As a professional photographer I use Photoshop, but I would not suggest you go for that as the learning curve will be too steep.
Iām not familiar with specific programs for non-pros but there is a list of free photo editing programs here that you could try:
You will find some tutorials on YouTube which may help you work out which tools in the photo editing programs to use - for example:
Some of my friends use GIMP.
In fact if all you want to do is Lighten / brighten a photo, Microsoftās own editing programme works fine. Assuming you have microsoft 10, double click on jpg which opens it up in āphotosā. Top LH side - click on edit button which opens up this screen. Play around with the sliders to lighten / darken / add more colour / add less.
Steepish, but not as steep as the price. In 2003 I had an artistās residency in Northumbrian rural libraries showing schoolkids, OAPs and farmers how to use Photoshop. The OAPs were combining with genealogy because the national records had just become available online and the farmers were learning to use it as part of a web design programme.
Meanwhile, Iām still using Photoshop v.CS3, which Iāve had for about sixteen years - still does everything I need. Likewise Adobe Illustrator.
If the program you pick has selection tools you can mask off the required area and apply a Hue/Saturation adjustment.
Itās always easier to do if the selected area has a clearly defined hue - colourising a neutral area requires adding a lot more saturation or may involve using overlaid colour layers which is a bit more technical.
Itās about Ā£10 a month which is no big deal for a professional but yes a touch pricey for personal/occasional use. Though that figure does include Lightroom as well
Yes the older versions are still viable, though they may not run on newer computers.
The biggest issue with an older edition is not being able to open RAW files from modern cameras, though there are workarounds such as Adobe DNG converter.
Come on guys, this isnāt fair - donāt terrify him! If you want to talk about photoshop, start a new thread. 
People use āphotoshopā to mean any post-editing programme. he needs something quick and easy and very simple. Thatās not your territory and itās for us rank amateurs to suggest.
A long time ago I used to use a great programme called Serif Photo Plus. I donāt know if it still exists. The basic photo editing software on my MacBook is more than enough for what I do now.
Itās now called Affinity, and they make DTP and photo editing software.
Thanks for that.nI used the Page Plus DTP software for decades, thatās how I came across Photo Plus. It was a fantastic bit of kit. I will have a look at Affinity.
Affinityās too complicated. He has one task he needs doing. Quite frankly, I suggest someone offers to do it for him.
I think Adam wanted to be able to think of an idea then 'shop some photos to see what it looked like before editing his car for real.
So someone else doing the work would be cumbersome.
Unfortunately itās not the easiest photo editing task
I wonder if there is an AI that will do it - āHAL, open the car doors please and make them blueā.
Thanks all !
Sorry Chris, but I was beginning to lose the will to continue a few minutes into the youtube tutorial ! If this is what you do, you have my admiration 
I tried GIMP which is nearer my level, but even with this I was dozing off !
Anyway, solved the problem: I printed off an A4 photo of the interior and with a scalpel, cut out the bits that I want to colour, and then overlay onto a coloired board to give me a visual idea! 
Move over Bill Gatesā¦
I looked online and as it was a Black Friday offer I bought it. Page Plus was always a budget buy but I think I probably paid about the same today as I did in the early 1990s so that was a real bargain. It all feels familiar and it will give me something to play with during the cold winter months. That and remembering how to edit videos on Da Vinci Resolve.
Now that is old school stuff - Swann Morton scalpel with a 10A blade?
TBH I hadnāt watched that video it just came up in a Google search, so I thought it might answer your question 
I donāt do a lot of product photography as itās a specialist area that often does require a lot of retouching, especially cars which have to look perfect.
Iāve done watches in the past and those were really tough as any speck of dust or stray reflection has to be fixed. Even worse if itās video rather than stills!
Nowadays watch product āphotosā are often CGI as they can generate a 3D model from a CAD file and add lighting and textures etc digitally. Good luck to them, I did a lot of watch photography when the pandemic was on and there wasnāt much other work but I avoid it now!
I mostly photograph people - they do need retouching sometimes but a Photoshop beauty plugin does most of the heavy lifting or I can send the files to India for 50c to $5 a pop!
You could paint those natty yellow/orange/red flames on it.
i used to use Photoshop for web design stuff, i do very little of that now and donāt want to pay all that money for an āonlineā product. i paid a small one off fee for this - Best Photo Editing Software | Black Friday 50% Off
works well, been using it for amateur photography too. i think itās a nottingham based company
An update. I bought Affinity Publisher and found it really good. There was a bit of a learning curve because a lot of the basic actions werenāt the same, or as intuitive as with Page Plus but it was exactly what I hoped to be. In fact itās far more refined than my old version was. I then bought Affinity Photo, partly because it was on a Black Friday 50% off offer and did seem to be very good value. I found it, as you pointed out, very difficult to use. At first I couldnāt see how to change basics like brightness and contrast. I have, however a photo of sunflowers that Iāve always wanted to āimproveā so I invested some time learning. Most searches for help ended at YouTube so I watched a few videos. For one reason or another I found them all a bit confusing, the one that seemed promising failed because he kept using keyboard shortcuts that didnāt work on my MacBook. I presumed he was using Windows and found a list of MacBook keyboard shortcuts but that didnāt help either. I even searched in the drop-down menus for the shortcut he was using but that didnāt help. Eventually I came across one that was promising and managed to do what I wanted to do which was to slightly enhance the foreground and change the sky. The trouble is that even with the finished picture on the screen I couldnāt work out what I had done and when trying to do a similar thing on another photo I got nowhere. It was frustrating as I could not work out where I was going wrong. I think that it was because I was trying to run because I could walk, I was trying to do advanced tasks without understanding how the software handled the basics. Never mind, I finally made the changes I wanted to the other photo but I still wasnāt sure why the final attempt worked when the others hadnāt. I had made progress and despite the frustration I was glad that I had bought such a powerful editor even if it was going to need a lot of patience on my part. Last night I watched a lovely documentary on channel 13 about Alsace from the mid C19th through to the modern day and about the influence that both France and Germany have shared on the region. It was fairly short so I thought that I would watch something else before bed and searched YouTube. The first item was a YouTube video about photo editing with Affinity Photo. I thought it would do so watched it. What luck, it was far clearer than any of the others that I had watched and he explained the basics very clearly. I will be trying some more editing later using that video as a guide. It will be later because since starting to type this the sun has appeared outside and a grey miserable day has turned into an inviting sunny one so Iām going to make the most of that.
Hahaha! Back to the future! Chapeau!
In the days before PS and the like, there were people who made a very good living doing a very difficult job - cutting large format transparencies [5"x4" or more often 10"x8"] into pieces and putting them together for a single image to go to the plate maker for print ads. This was particularly so with vehicle pix because thereās so much variation - shiny paintwork v jet black tyres.
A car photographer that I worked with did a shot of a R-R with the Eiffel Tr in the b/gnd. The ad was for Avon tyres, the R-R default rubber. The pic was from front on, to get a view of the tread.
An exposure that showed the tread was way over for the rest of the shot - car, Eiffel tr et al.
In the end, the tranny that went to the plate maker consisted of bits of 10 of the 10"x8" trannies of various exposures.
How those people must have cursed as PS came along and the same job could be done by a undergrad at Bournemouth School of Art.
Thatās what happened to a graphics designer pal of mine. He set his face against PS/CorelDraw etc, maintaining that a good result could only be done by a person, a highly trained person, and sheaves of Letteraset.
His commisions fell into a black hole. The bread and butter stuff was done by a spotty teenager on a Mac and the big bucks stuff in the black-glass groovy outfits up Covent Gdn/Soho.
He spent a fortune on a Mac and s/w, spent 6 months learning how to use it but it was too late. All his clients had long gone.
