This tutorial will cover how to simply turn a digital image into black and white while maintaing colors in a specific selection. Click on images to view details.

I’ve always loved this picture of my friend Sarah except as you can see, it’s not very presentable due to below-average digital photography equipment. the terribly plain and dowdy colors. It just looks- boring! So naturally, I hit Photoshop, my answer to all life’s problems… After some thought, I decided that I want the image to focus on Sarah, headline, “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” (a good Jack Johnson song).

First off, I selected Sarah and her chair using the pen tool (press P, draw selection around object, then press A, right click, select “Make Selection” and turn it into a selection path).

Right click on the selection and select “Select Inverse” to select the background image and leave Sarah and her chair intact. Now press Shift+Control+Z to desaturate the background then go to “Image” -> “Adjustments” -> “Brightness/Contrast” and increase the contrast.

Now that we have the background all darkened out, we need to set the focus on Sarah. Right click on the selection again and select “Select Inverse” to reselect Sarah and her chair. Now press Control+B and edit the colors to get the most out of them.

Finally, “Select Inverse” one last time and use the brush tool to add “weight” to Sarah and her chair by darkening and increasing the shadow beneath them (let’s not over do it though, eh?) The result should look like this:

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 12:50 am and is filed under Digital Photography, How To, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.