Selective Coloring with Photoshop

[MissErin]

This is really a very easy photo edit that you can do, and it can have a striking effect as well. But I remember being daunted as to how this could be done, I thought surely it has to be VERY difficult!

Well, let me show you...




(I am using a stock photo)
These instructions were made with Adobe Photoshop, you might have to tweak the names of a few things for this to work in other programs.
For this tutorial, we are going to be very simple and only have the eyes colored when we are done.
It will look like this:





First, open up your image. Right click on it and click "duplicate layer." You now will have two of the same layer in your layers palette.





Now with the top layer selected, click image>adjustments>desaturate. This will turn your photo black and white, but often you'll find it's a little blah looking. The next couple steps you can choose to follow or skip. But if you use them, your finished result should be more striking and have higher contrast.
With your top layer still selected, go to image>adjustments>curves. Ordinarily the line goes straight diagonally across the box. Turn it in to a slight S shape. How little or how much you adjust depends on the photo.





Now apply a gradient map. Make sure your foreground and background colors are set to black and white. Well, you could use color if you like that sort of thing : )
Then click image>adjustments>gradient map. And yes, this is still with the top layer.

Now you have a very nice high contrast black and white photo! Thank you to Julie for teaching me that once upon a time : )
Now again with the black and white layer selected, you can take out the parts where you want color to show through. As with this photo, we wanted those baby blues to POP. All I did was use a soft eraser to remove his gray eyeballs and then the bottom layer that still has his original eye color shows through. You can use an eraser, or the pen tool as well (if you read my tut on extractions). Tee hee!
You can also take the drama up a notch by increasing the saturation of the bottom layer (the one in color) and those blue eyes will look REALLY blue!
Hope you like my tut for today!

Ha ha, now I realize you can see what other programs I had open in my screenshots lol. Sooo now you know when I am neglecting you, it is because I'm playing The Sims!

*thank you to stockxchange for the stock photo

[hybridgal]

Great tutorial!! I am supposed to do this for another site challenge and didn't quite understand their directions. Yours made perfect sense! Thank you!

[<3Mad_Scrapper]

i love this tip!
heres the original

and the selective color

[Sandra]

Great tutorial. Thank you so much for sharing it with us

[msbrad]

I love selective coloring...
m

[amy!]

me too..I love it...I remember oh wait back in the day...I'd do selective coloring on everything....I use to think I was so cool when I got pictures printed...hehe, I'm a dork.

[HeideC]

Originally Posted by amy!

me too..I love it...I remember oh wait back in the day...I'd do selective coloring on everything....I use to think I was so cool when I got pictures printed...hehe, I'm a dork.

hahahaha - you're not a dork Amy!

I did this one layout of my ds that turned out great! I just wish I remembered all the steps so I could repeat it {now who's the dork}

[MissErin]

Great job on the edit Marie!
Glad you guys find it useful!

[kim21673]

You are rocking these tutorials Erin!!

[nevaeh.aaric]

The selection doesn't have to be perfect, but the closer it is, the less work you'll have later. Still, it's much better to err on the side of caution, and select too many pixels rather than too few. Select Color Range Photoshop Dialog BoxLet's have a look at some of the different choices for selecting the colors we want to keep. Lasso Tool - You can draw an outline around the stripes of color on the wings, and the purple flower to select them. This is the quickest method, but maybe the least accurate. On the other hand, because the wings around the pink stripe are already black, we can get away with less accuracy here. Magic Wand Tool - This tool selects the pixel you click on, and all adjacent pixels of similar color. Building the SelectionYou can use the "Tolerance" field to determine how similar two pixels have to be for the second to get selected. This would work very well for the wings, because the pink is so different from the black that surrounds it, but not quite as well for the flower, because it's made of several colors. Still, any situation the wand tool works in, it's usually a better choice than the lasso. Color Range - Use the eye-dropper tool to pick the color you want to preserve, then go to the Select menu, and choose Color Range... This will select colors throughout the frame that are similar to the one you chose, and let you set the tolerance - how similar another color needs to be to get selected - with a slider. This tool gives you a preview of the image, in black and white to show a map of which pixels will be selected and which won't. The window at right shows the Select -> Color Range tool in action; the white pixels will be selected, gray pixels will be partially selected, and black won't be selected at all. This provides a good starting point; you could come back and deselect the leaves in the background with the lasso tool. Chances are you'll wind up using some combination of the three selection techniques. With all of them, you can hold down the shift key to add to the selection, or alt to remove from it.