A Creative Technique in Photoshop

In my previous post on Photoshop, I talked through the step by step development process for a sample image.

In this post, I will go through a step by step tutorial to teach you to isolate some of the colour within an image, while leaving the rest of the image in black and white.

I took the photograph I'll be working with in the Lake District and as usual, I had my trusty prop, Bob the skull, with me. Here is the original picture, Bob lying in a bath of water which I found while exploring. I'd like to create a black and white image which leaves only the skull in colour as contrast to the rest of the picture. 

So, the first step is to open your photograph in Photoshop.

With the image open, you need to create a copy of the image, known as a duplicate layer. Highlight the background image line (highlighted in the screen shot above) and right click to get the drop down menu shown in the screen shot below. Select duplicate layer.

An options box should pop up on screen and simply select OK to this. 

You now have a duplicate image. Keep the duplicate image selected and go to the top menu then select layer, new adjustment layer, and black & white. These selections are highlighted in the screen shot below.

You should now have another selection box on screen (as shown below) and as before, click OK. 

You will now have a black and white version of your original image. Make sure this is the image you have selected to work on (ie. it is highlighted in the layers box as shown below), and we can set about reintroducing the areas of colour which are going to be put back into the picture.

Firstly, select the eraser tool from the vertical left hand menu.

Then from the top menu, select the size of eraser you would like to use. To begin with I tend to use a large size (sometimes up to 120) and I reduce this when I move onto the finer tuning of the picture.

Now use the eraser to paint over the area of the picture to which you would like to add colour. You can see in the screen shot below that the original colour of the skull is returning.

When it's time to fine tune the picture, zoom in a bit to make sure you don't go over the edges. The zoom tool is towards the bottom of the left diagonal menu bar. (Tip - use your left mouse button to zoom in, use alt and your left mouse button to zoom out).

Zooming in is useful for colouring the edges of the skull. You can see from the screen shot below that I need to use the eraser again to fine tune around the top of the skull in particular.

When you have finished colouring, you might consider using the adjustments tool (lower left box in the shot below) to enhance the brightness and contrast of the picture. This can help make the image much more noticeably black and white with a bit of colour.

And my final image looks like this:

Although this technique has been used for a number of years, I feel it can be very effective. It is probably a case of less being more, just a small patch of colour is more eye catching than having a number of colours added back into a black and white image. I considered colouring the reflection of the skull when I was working but opted to stick with just colouring the skull as I felt this had greater visual impact.

I tried the technique with a misty morning scene as well. In this case I added the colour of the daffodils back into the image. The final photograph is below and I was really pleased with this one as the yellow is a good contrast against the dark gate and grey stone wall. I will definitely be experimenting more with this technique.