Christian Photographers Community

How does one go about editing a photograph to remove color on all but one section?  You know, like leaving just the color on a shirt, or the hair, or on a flower?  Is that really hard to do?  Or is it something simple I am overlooking?   Any and all help is greatly appreciated!!

what program you have to edit with makes a big difference.

My way of doing it is in layers because I like being able to undo things easily since I generally screw up multiple times. 

I'm going to operate here assuming you have photoshop.  This is what I think the easiest way is.  Forgive me if I seem to be talking down to you, I'm not sure how much you do or don't know.  I'd rather be too thorough than not enough.

Do a layer of hue/saturation and take the saturation bit all the way down.  Then, you paint on the mask with black over the colour you want.  That will show the colour.  It is best to try to get it as exact as you can, but then blur it out...I usually do a bit of a gaussian blur on the layer mask.  That makes it look less cut out.

Mask...in case you haven't used them before...are a way of adjusting parts of a layer you do.  Think "white reveals, black conceals", ie., if you leave the mask all white, you'll see that whole layer and if you paint it black you won't see what you just did.  So, with a hue and saturation layer, if you paint black over part of it, the desaturation will be concealed...giving you the colour back. 

If you open the layers tab (window) you'll see your background layer that is your picture.  If you've done the hue/saturation layer already, you'll see that above the background layer.  You'll notice that there are 2 squares on that line, where there is only one on the background.  The square on the right is what you want highlighted (a blue line around it) for you to be able to work with it. 

I hope that helps.  There are other ways of doing it.  I personally don't like just using the hue/saturation layer because that doesn't give me as much of a contrasty b&w as I like.  So, I'll go ahead and make a whole other copy of the image that is b&w then paste it on as a new layer and then add a mask to that (the hue/sat layer will automatically come with a mask but you can add one to any layer) but the end process is the same.

Hi Sam.....
               If you are wanting to make a B & W pix with a portion of it in color, what I do is in photoshop.  I first make the B & W image save it (use a new name), than I click on the X box in the right corner to remove the image from the pallette, than I bring it back up on the screen under the new file name, I than open the original pix, and drag it down slightly below the B & W image, go to the small layer pallette, and drag that image and place it directly over the B & W, than I erase the color out of the new layer except what I want to remain, save it when you are done, I am still new to photoshop, but I am finding new ways of creating effects in photo's, I am sure there are many other methods that others use as well to achieve the same effect...Hope I was a help!
         LarryBoy