Drawing Attention with Selective Color

I took this picture of my son, and I really liked his pretty brown eye, but it seemed lacking in "oomph". So I decided to take my favorite part of the picture and draw complete attention to it.

Your mission today, should you choose to accept it: to change this picture from kind of a blah, color picture, to a striking black & white picture with a selected object in color.

Zoom in to make your selection of the part or object that you want to leave in color:

• Select the area with the Marquee tool ('M', 'Sh+M' to change Marquee shape).
• Feather the selection a couple pixels to soften the edges a little bit. We want it to blend nicely, not pop out unnaturally.

P.S. Would you just kill for those eyelashes or what?

Cmd (or Ctrl) +J will put your selection on its own layer.

This will isolate the element from the rest of the picture. Don't worry. It won't be lonely. It needed some 'me time' anyway.

Dude, eyeballs are kinda creepy close up, huh? And now I see an eye booger I could have cloned out. Oh, well; it won't be noticeable when we zoom back out, anyway.

We're going to take this picture from color to black & white using Gradient Map.

• First, press 'D' to make sure you have the Default color setting, which is foreground=black and background=white.
• Click on Background layer to select it.
• Then, see the bottom of the layers palette with all the little doodads there? Click on the circle that’s half black half white. This menu pops up for you to choose what kind of adjustment layer you want. We want Gradient Map, so click that.
• A box will pop up, just hit enter.

We need to pump up the Saturation of his eye color:

• Click on Layer 1 to select it.
• Click on the same black & white circle you just did, but this time, choose Hue/Saturation instead.

The best way to learn how Photoshop changes work is to totally max it out, then back up until you are happy with the effect. Here's what Saturation maxed out does to my layer. Whoa!

I fussed with it until I finally chose 40%. It was a striking change, but not unnaturally so.

Now we're gonna do a really cool thing with my son's eyeball:

• Make a selection about the same size and feather it a couple pixels just as you did earlier. If I'd been thinking ahead, I'd have saved the selection back then to load it now, but I'm not always real great on foresight. For future reference, you can do that by clicking Select, then Save Selection.

As long as you haven't changed your colors from the default earlier, hitting Cmd (or Ctrl) +Del will fill the selected area with white.

Ack! He looks like a zombie! Don't panic. I'm not trying to make him look like the undead on purpose. Watch this.

At the top of the layers palette, the default blending mode is Normal. Change it to Soft Light.

Whoa! Cool effect, but let's dial it down a bit.

Opacity is at the top of the Layers Palette on the right. Change it from 100% to 20%.

Ahhh… that's better.

And we're done!

We've changed this picture to a striking black & white picture with that draws attention to a focus point with color!

Go through your pictures tonight and see if you have any that would benefit from this treatment. It's like a spa day for one of your lucky pics!

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Dory is ADD-addled, Deaf, a phenomenal wife, a bewildered mom, a fantabulous girlfriend, and an enthusiastic graphic designer, blogger, and photographer. She juggles a husband in school full-time, two sons, two cats, and a Jack Russell Terrier while heroically coping with a powerful addiction to Photoshop and Twitter. She loves to have people over at Can't Remember Diddly! her blog casa.

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