Remove Color, Add Drama to Photos
How To Use Color To Highlight The Subject In Black-and-White Images
This digital photography tutorial takes a color digital photo and uses selection tools to produce a mainly black-and-white image with a subject highlighted in full color.
The example photo features a striking blond in a red dress, and yet everybody is ignoring her. The décor and clothes worn by those surrounding her are predominantly dark and gray. To accentuate this feeling of isolation, she remains in full color while the other parts of the image are black and white. Exercise a degree of restraint using this composition technique, as it is a photographic cliché brought about by overuse. While it does add impact to an image, if the composition does not support the impact, the image can look false and overly contrived.
The basis for this effect is selecting areas of the original color image using Adobe Photoshop CS2 tools, and then taking the color out of the selected area, making it black and white. Despite the compositional reservations, this is a good introductory exercise for Photoshop selection techniques. This ability to edit selectively portions of an image really unlocks the power of Photoshop. Of course, these basic tools and techniques are available in other editing programs such as the gimp.
Edit a Copy
The first and most important step is to make a copy of the original file and use the copy.
Selection Tools
Photoshop offers a number of selection tools and one of the most useful is the magnetic lasso. This tool is suitable for easily selecting objects with complex edges where there are high-contrast backgrounds. It is in a group with two others on the tool dialog box. If it is not visible, right click on the icon to reveal all the lasso tools.
Start by clicking on a edge point of the target area; this creates the first anchor point. Then trace the outline of the area with the magnetic lasso tool. The line will tend to snap automatically to points where there is a well-defined outline of an object, although not always. The closer you trace the outline with the tool, the better the selection. At points during the trace, the magnetic lasso tool will insert anchor points, or at key points you can insert them manually with a mouse click.
If the trace line starts to head off track, the delete key can take you back to a good anchor point to restart tracing the selection outline. To end the selection process, double left click with the mouse, and the anchor points should disappear, leaving a wavy dotted line around the target area or selection.
To make your selection and manual anchor points more accurate, zoom into the image. To move the enlarged image when you run up against the border of the window, hold down the space bar. This temporarily changes the active tool to the hand tool for moving the image. When the space bar is released, the magnetic lasso becomes the active tool again and resumes at the same spot.
Making the Black and White Area
With an area selected, image attribute tools now operate only on the selected area, leaving the rest of the image isolated. For this exercise, the colored area is to say the same, while the rest of the image is to be black and white. From the select option in the top menu bar, choose Inverse. This changes the selected area from inside the enclosed area to outside the target area.
Now apply the desaturate option from the images adjust menu, and everything not in the selected area loses it color, while the selected area retains its color.
This basic technique of limiting the application of image adjustments to a target area opens the door to a host of other touches to apply to images.
