Digital Diversity

Its no wonder that the eyes are considered the window to the soul. They can give away your emotions and are, too many, a thing of beauty.

In the world of photography and Photoshop one of the most import things to do in a portrait shot is get the eyes in focus. The are instinctively the first thing we look at in a portrait shot, both of humans and animals. If you get the eyes out of focus it can ruin the shot. However if you get almost everything out of focus except the eyes the image can still work.

In this second portraiture tutorial I will go through 4 ways to help you retouch the eyes to make them really stand out using Photoshop.

Lightening the eyes

This is the method by which you simply lighten the eyes but keep a natural appearance.

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Have you have ever looked at pictures you have taken or even just looked at the world around you and wondered what it would look like if everything was a different colour. Maybe the sky would be green or the leaves on the trees a brilliant orange?

Do you have old black and white photo’s that you would love to see in colour?

Well you don’t have to wonder about it, just do it using Photoshop. This tutorial will show you how to alter colours or even add colour to black and white using hue / saturation adjustment layers.

Re-colour your world

For this I am going to use a nice and simple image from my library.

Add a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer above your image layer. Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue / Saturation. In the adjustment layer options window make sure the colorize option is ticked. This will add a colour cast to your image. Change the Hue to get the desired colour. Adjust the saturation and lightness if needed. Then hide the adjustment layer by clicking the eye symbol.

The next step is to use the mask on the adjustment layer to make it effect only the parts of the image you want to be that colour. The tree is a fairly complicated subject to mask due to its fine detail of leaves and the small gaps revealing the sky behind it.

If you have not used selection tools and masks before I suggest you read the tutorials on layers and their masks and selection tools and advanced masking before continuing.

To make this easier select your Magic wand tool. Set your tolerance to about 50. Click on a blue part of the sky and you should get a selection line going all around the tree. Go Select > Similar and you should find all the small parts of sky that are visible through the tree are now also selected as in the example image.

The sky should now all be selected. Make your adjustment layer visible again. Select the mask on your adjustment layer and fill the selection in black. This should leave a white shape of the tree and the grass on the mask making the tree and grass red on your image.

Duplicate the current Hue / Saturation adjustment layer. Then select the mask. If you don’t have the selection visible any more Ctrl click on the mask to bring it back. Then on the new adjustment layer fill it in white. Then invert the selection by going Select > Inverse. Then fill the selection in black. You should have a mask that is the exact opposite of the previous adjustment layer.

Using the new adjustment layer change the colour to something different. You will be left with a sky that is one colour and a tree and grass that are another.

Duplicate the first adjustment layer you made (right click > duplicate). Change the colours again to something different. Then carefully paint black on the mask to hide the leaves. This will leave you with the grass and tree trunk in the new colour.

Duplicate the new adjustment layer and change the colour again. Now use black on the mask to hide the tree trunk leaving you with just the grass in the new colour.

You have now separated all the elements of the page and they all have new colours. The best thing about adjustment layers is that you can go back and change them when ever you want. If you don’t like these colours you can just choose different ones till you find the combination you like best.

Here are 3 examples

You can basically choose what ever colours you want. Its a simple matter of getting the masks right and then worrying about the colours later.

Re-colour black and white images

This exact same technique can be used to add colour to black and white images as well.

Frist I open my black and white image.

For the first Hue / Saturation adjustment layer I chose a nice pink colour then, using the mask, painted in the petals.

On the next adjustment layer I used a green and painted in the stem and leaves.

The final part was to make the background darker. I did this with a third Hue / Saturation adjustment layer and adjusted the lightness slider to make it almost totally black to finish off the image.

Advanced colouring tips

You may find that using the hue, saturation and lightness doesn’t give you the colours you need. For more advanced colour options add a Contrast and Levels adjustment layer to each Hue / Saturation layer. Make sure they only effect the Hue / Saturation adjustment layer by linking them (holding down Alt and clicking between the layers to indent them).

Get as close as possible to the colour you want using the Hue / Saturation layer. Then tweak it to perfection using the contrast and levels layers.

Using this technique you can add colour to more complicated images such as portraits.

View the finished example image in large to see how the layers are stacked.

Original image is from iStock then converted to black and white to appear as bellow.

Then advanced colouring was used to re colour it.

This method could be used to restore old black and white images your family may have laying about. It can also be used to change single elements of an image, such as a persons hair or skin colour. Maybe you want to see what you would look like with a tan and blond hair? Well just open your photo in Photoshop and use the advanced colouring technique to find out.

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.