Photoshop Techniques - Selective Coloring

by Alan Warriner

I find that selective coloring of an image can be useful to highlight a particular item or to suppress a 'messy' background. I also like to use the technique create a black and white photograph with only key elements retaining their colour. Open the image in Photoshop (or a suitable alternative, Paintshop Pro is more than capable for this). I've chosen this photo of peaches taken in Menorca. I wish I could show you the before and after, I selected them to post but they haven't appeared. I'll try again, this should be the original. For this example I'm going to go a bit extreme and skew the colours. First make a duplicate of the image on a new layer, from the Layer menu select Duplicate Layer. Now we will create an Adjustment Layer to alter the colours in the image. Choose New Adjustment Layer from the Layers Menu and select Hue/Saturation. Click on the Colorize check box, Slide the Hue to -150 and set the Saturation to -50, the peaches should now look like no peach on earth! (if you want a B&W image don't select Colorize, and set Saturation to zero, this is one way of creating a monochrome image). This is after the the Hue/Saturation changes. Now we want to restore one of the peaches to its normal colouring. Click on the layer mask on the Hue/Saturation layer in the layers palette, the layer mask is the white box to the right-hand side, it will have a double border around it once it is selected. The layer mask controls which parts of the image are affected by the adjustment layer, any point on the mask with white pixels is affected by the adjustment, any area with black pixels is unchanged (grey pixels vary the strength between the two extremes). You will see that the layer mask is initially all white, we want to paint in black to reveal unchanged areas underneath. Select a suitable brush and select black as the foreground colour. Now start painting on the Hue/Saturation layer mask, you should see the original peach colours being revealed. Here I've started to reveal some of the original colour. If you're not too accurate with your painting just select white as the foreground colour and paint on the affected area to erase the error. And now the final image in all its weirdness. Remember - this technique can be used with any layer that has a layer mask to selectively control the area(s) and amount of an effect.

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