Black & White with a little color?

[NikeMikey]

What is the best/easiest way to convert a color picture into a black and white picture, while still retaining the color of part of the picture (the subject) in Photoshop CS?

[PacAce]

- Make a duplicate layer (this is optional)
- Using your favorite selection tool, select the subject you want to have retain the color, use about 3 pxl feathering
-Select Invert the selection
-Go to Image|Adjustments|Desaturate

and you're done. This is the easiest way to do it but not necessarily the best way which, for me, would take a couple of more extra steps. :)

[Gibmeister]

Is this what you are trying to do?
http://images.fotopic.net/?id=1319260&outx=600&oq=0

[minatophase3]

What is the best/easiest way to convert a color picture into a black and white picture, while still retaining the color of part of the picture (the subject) in Photoshop CS?

Here is what I did for this picture:

http://www.thenationfamily.com/images/kaitlyn/mar04/kaitlyn.jpg


Convert to Gray Scale > Convert back to RGB (picture will now be black and white)
Create Duplicate Background Layer
Pick a color and use the paint brush to color what you want
Reduce Opacity so that you get a nice see through color

I would suggest adding a new Duplicate Background layer for each color you would like to do. I think I had a total of 5 layers for the picture above.

-Original Layer
-Jacket
-Flowers
-Cheeks
-Hair (yes there is a slight coloration on her hair)

Making pictures like this is a lot of fun. In fact, I just made 2 more last night of my girls for their Grandma for Mother's Day :D .

Good luck and have fun being creative! Oh, I should mention, I do not have PS CS but use PS 6.0. I would assume the process is very similar though.

Tim

[NikeMikey]

Gibmeister - That's exactly what I'm trying to do.

I've tried using the Select Color Range option to select the yellow in my picture, and it selects the flower perfectly, but when I try to cut or modify it in CS, it affects a whole bunch more pixels in my photo.

Here is the link to the actual sized picture (the very first picture on the page):
http://members.shaw.ca/nikemikey/

I'm trying to just keep the flowers color with the rest B&W, and then turn up the saturation on the flower. I'm also trying to keep the image as high quality as I can, so I can print it out

Thanx for all the great input..................................Mikey

[Gibmeister]

Mikey,

I will give you the link to where I found out how to do this when I get home from work. Basically you have two layers, one in color and one in B&W then you erase the B&W layer and let the color come through from the other layer. I'll post the link in a couple of hours.

Gib

[Gibmeister]

I remembered that I had this from another post. Here goes.

http://ww.adobeevangelists.com/pdfs/photoshop/neworupdatedfor6PS6/SelectiveColoring.pdf

Hope this helps

Gib

[PacAce]

- Make a duplicate layer (this is optional)
- Using your favorite selection tool, select the subject you want to have retain the color, use about 3 pxl feathering
-Select Invert the selection
-Go to Image|Adjustments|Desaturate

and you're done. This is the easiest way to do it but not necessarily the best way which, for me, would take a couple of more extra steps. :)

Here, I took the liberty of taking one of your pictures and coverting it to what I think you wanted. I basically applied the above method I described previously with a little more refinement which I'll explain below.

http://www.tanseikai.com/tanseikai/images/others/butterfly-flower.jpg

1. I used the Selection Color Range tool to select the basic yellow colors with a fuzz of around 45. I used this just to get the general areas selected. It selected more than I wanted but that's OK since I can get rid of any excess later on.

2. Once I have most of what I want selected, I view the image in Actual Pixels. Then Zoom In so it's bigger than actual size.

3. Using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, I meticulously work my way around the butterfly and the flower in manageable segments. Hold down the SHIFT key first so that the new selections are added to what's already been selected. This is the most tedious part of doing the selection but the hard work really pays off! :)

BTW, make sure that the feathering is set to 0 for this tool (on the top tool panel). If feathering is applied automatically for you, it's going to really mess you up depending on how much feather is specified.

4. Once the butterfly and the flower have been selected in their entirety, you can go and remove the unwanted parts of the image that was selected by the Selection Color Range tool. I used the Polygonal Lasso Tool after holding down the ATL key to "minus" the selection from the total selection.

5. Now the fun begins. Resize image to fit screen.

6. Now apply a little bit of feathering via Select | Feather... and type in 3.

7. Invert the selection with Select | Invert.

8. Remove the colors from the background. Image | Adjustment | Desaturate.

9. Adjust the levels of the background so that it's not too dark nor too light.

10. Blur out the background a little using Filter | Blur | Gaussian Blur. I used a value of 6.

11. Invert the selection again so that we can work on the butterfly and flower. Select | Invert

12. Adjust the contrast of the image. Here I used about +20 for the contrast. This was enough to saturate the colors enough that I didn't need to add any further saturation to the color.

13. Voila! It's done! :mrgreen:

(BTW, at this point you can apply some USM for printing or resize the image first for the web and then apply a little bit of USM.)

[NikeMikey]

PacAce - Thanx for the help man. That's pretty close to what I wanted, but not quite. I was looking for just the flower to be yellow. I've finally figured out the best way to do it, and here is what I came up with:

http://members.shaw.ca/nikemikey/B&W%20Butterfly.jpg