Selective colour, also know as ‘selective black and white’ as well as ‘colour pop’, is when you make all but part of an image black and white to make the colours really stand out.
It is a fairly popular Photoshop technique and can create some really impressive results with not to much effort.
Using Photoshop you can change your photographs into eye catching shots no matter what camera you own.
Below is an example of selective colour. I have used this technique to make the flower pop out from the rest of the image. You can also adjust the brightness of the black and white areas to make your subject stand out even more.
There are many methods to create this effect but I will be showing you the 2 I use most. The reason I will be showing you 2 methods is because it depends on the image which one works best.
Selective colour – method 1
This is the longer but more accurate of the 2 methods. It also gives you a little bit of extra freedom to play around with the image exactly how you want to.
First lets get an image.
You now need to decide what parts of the image you want to be in colour. I’m going to do the obvious on this one. I’m going to leave the red shell of the ladybug in colour and let the rest be black and white. This should really help emphasize the ladybug.
Add a Hew / Saturation adjustment layer
This will place a new adjustment layer above your image. Now on the Hue / Saturation options, the colour should be on ‘Master’, move the saturation slider all the way to the left. The image will now appear black and white.
Now we need to use the Hue / Saturation layers mask to reveal the parts we want to be in colour. Click on the layer mask so it is selected (the white box). Now using a brush with a hardness of 80% and in the colour black, start to paint the colour back onto the page.
Remember to use different size brushes for accuracy. Zoom right in and use small brushes for the edges. You can change brush sizes quickly using the ‘[' and ']‘ keys. On areas like the top of the shell you may notice the focus blurs making it hard to colour accurately. If you have trouble try colouring past the shell so some of the background is now in colour as well. Now change the colour to white, use a larger brush with a hardness of about 20-40% and carefully make the background black and white again. The softer larger brush will fade the colour better giving a cleaner result.
The basic work is now complete. However its always a good idea to tweak the image further for greater effect. First lets adjust the black and white areas of the image.
Click on your Hue / Saturation adjustment layer to bring up the options window again. Now where the drop down menu says ‘Master’, change this to reds and adjust the lightness slider.
Increasing the red lightness on this image makes the background a bit brighter.
Now repeat this for each of the colour options on the drop down menu until the image is how you want it. The main colours i changed were the red (increased) and the blue and cyan’s which i decreased. This made the blue reflections on the ladybug turn black.
Now we need to adjust the colour parts of the image. To do this we need a new Hue / saturation adjustment layer. Select your image layer (the bottom layer) and then create the new adjustment layer, Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue / Saturation.
If using elements click the OK button and don’t change anything yet.
We need to make sure only the coloured part of the image effected.
To do this move your mouse cursor over the mask for the first Hue / Saturation adjustment layer you made. Hold down the Ctrl key and click. A selection line should appear around all the black and white parts of the image.
Now select the mask on the new Hue / Saturation adjustment layer you made. Fill in the selected area with black. Do this either with the paint bucked tool or by going Edit > Fill.
You will now have a mask that is the opposite of the black and white layer mask and should only effect the coloured part of the image.
Open up the options for the new Hue / Saturation adjustment layer by clicking on it. Change the drop down menu to reds. Move the hue slider a bit to the left and the shell will become more red. For fun try moving the hue slider about and you will see it can be changed all sorts of colours.
Your image is now complete
Selective colour – method 2
This second method is faster but will only work on images where you want all of that particular colour in the image to stand out. So for an image with a red bug on a red wall (such as the first image) it wont work. But for an image of a red bug on green grass then this method could work just great.
Lets see if i can find an image like that.
Oh look at that…. perfect.
First step is to add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue / Saturation. You want the reds to still be in colour so you need to move the saturation slider all the way to the left for every colour in the drop down menu APART FROM Reds and Master.
As you de-saturate each colour you will see more and more of the image turn black and white. When your done, just the reds should remain. Now select reds from the drop down menu and adjust the hue to make the shell more red.
As before, feel free to go back to the other colours and adjust there lightness to get the desired effect.
Your done.
