TheByte

Alfie

As selective colouring has been discussed vividly lately and I sense some jealousy among those who cannot achieve this in photoshop, I thought I'd go through a few easy steps to achieving this result in Photoshop
Should be said as well, this has been a really boring Sunday

Software: Adobe Photoshop. Most versions should be sufficient.
Level: Beginner / +

There are easier ways to doing this but this way will prepare you for more complex methods and also encourage you to experiment on your own and develop tricks that fit you and your style.

First, we need an image. I'll go with this one.


You may choose whatever photo you want, the technique is the same.
Open your image in Photohop

Duplicate the background layer. If you don't know the quick way for doing this, go to Layer>Duplicate Layer

Now we're going to turn the duplicated layer into Black & White. The bottom layer will still have color(which we won't see after this step), which we'll use later for the selective coloring.

Choose the top layer and go to Image>Adjustments>Black & White, or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+B.
The settings here often depend on what you want to achieve and how skilled you are. I think I'll go for the preset Maximum Black this time. There is no right or wrong here.

And here comes what can be a bit tricky for beginners. We're going to create a layer mask, and select what shall be colored and what will not.
To create a layer mask, go to Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All. Or click the quick button for this in the layers palette, pointed out here.


Now we choose a black brush and paint on what we want to colorize. By painting black in the mask we select what parts of the underlying layer will shine through. If you slip, just change the brush color to white and correct it. So much better than the eraser!
Brush size, hardness and such things can depend on your image but play around, you'll get the hang of it.

You can get a hint from the picture above of how the layer mask should look like in the layers palette.

Now you should have a successfully partially colored image. Here's mine so far.


Now we'll take things a step further, just for the sake of doing it.
Lets add an adjustment layer. The button for this is just to the right of the Layer mask button. Select Gradient Map, and choose a gradient that goes from black to white. And then duplicate this layer! You should now have two adjustment layers on top of the other layers.

Set the Blending Mode on the top of these to layers to Overlay, and on the bottom one to Soft Light
This should give you a hard contrast effect. To make it a bit easier on the eyes we'll reduce the opacity.
Set the opacity on the above layer to ~50%, and the bottom to ~60%. Things should look better now?

If your layers palette looks something like this, I say congratulations, you have at least the intelligence of a rubber duck


As we're having fun, lets add another adjustment layer. A Photo Filter this time. Choose Sepia and set the Density to 50%.

To finish things off, go back to the colored layer. Now go to Image>Adjustment>Brightness/Contrast, and up the contrast ~+10.

You should now have a high contrast selectively colored image. This was purely to show you some useful steps in editing a photo. Lesson should be: Adjustment layers combined with the right blending mode can do wonders.
Whatever you are editing, always play around with this at least some!

Here's what the result of this could look like.


Happy photoshopping

Rob

Thanks for taking the time to do this Christian

Va Va Voom

Thanks for that Christian!

Heres two I quickly did






Oh btw if your using Cs2 , you wonna go Image>Adjustments>Desaturate

Alfie

Or, Ctrl+Shift+U

But you usually lose quality by turning pictures into B&W that way. Gradient Map, Lab Color and B&W are my favorite tools for converting to B&W

dOmInIX

Thanks for this tutorial, man. I never really bothered to do Selective coloring but I was bored now and did this:



I really like those Gradient Maps in CS4, thanks a lot for the tip!