How to create a black&white image with selective colors in Photoshop

You have probably seen it many times: a black and white photo where one or a few elements are colored. Or maybe you’ve seen the movie “Sin City“, where selective coloring is used throughout. Selective coloring makes a great effect and can be used as a visual expression or to emphasize a part of an image.
It looks really impressive, sometimes stunning, but it is actually quite simple to accomplish. In this article I will show you how it’s done.

There are several ways to accomplish the same thing, but the method I describe here is maybe the most “photoshopish” way.

Find yourself a photo that has at least one element that stands out with a bright color (or several colors). Or you can download the test photo from here.

First, open the image in Photoshop (obviously).

What we need to do is create a new layer where we will do the work, leaving the background layer untouched. Create a new layer by clicking on the menu item Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation

This brings up a dialog asking for a name for the new layer. Just accept the default.

Then, in the Adjustments palette, make sure “Master” is selected in the dropdown, grab the Saturation slider and slide it all the way to the left, effectively removing all color from the image. (This is not the recommendend way of creating a black & white image, but it serves our purpose here.)

Now for the fun part. Choose the Brush tool, adjust it to a hardness of 80 (make sure roundness is set to 100%), zoom in to the picture and start painting on the part of the image that you want colored. You will see that you are now painting the color from the background layer back into the image.

I prefer to zoom in quite a bit and work on the edges first, leaving the “fill” for last. Then I can use a pretty large brush to paint the rest.

And that’s it! It’s really simple and if you’ve been reasonably careful at the edges, your final image should look something like the large image below.

A few words of advice

To maximize the effect of selective colors, make sure you don’t color too much of the image! The effect is usually at its best when only a small part of the image is colored. And that part should preferably be brightly colored.

Be warned also that color in itself is a strong attention grabber. If you color a part of the image that is unrelated to what you really want to convey with your image, you increase the chance that your message is lost!

Yes, this means that the example working image I’ve used here is not a good example. The colored part takes up too much of the overall space, effectively robbing all other parts of the image of the attention. On the other hand, there are no other parts of the image that needs attention. So it works for illustration. The feature photo at the top is much better in that regard.

Also, be sure to check out the Flickr photos at the bottom of this article!

Great Flickr photos with selective colors:

Even though the berry takes up rather much of the frame, I think this photo works because the berry is the main attraction, and the splash does not lose it’s impact by the fact that the berry is red.

I think this photo is great for selective coloring for several reasons:

• It is simple, so there are few elements to disturb the message
• The implied line from her eyes to the apple is a strong leading line
• The apple is small in the frame, yet it is the main subject. Being the only colored object emphasizes its importance even more

A couple of other photos coming (awaiting photographer approval)!

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. How to simulate cross-processing in digital photography
2. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography – An introduction
3. Introduction to digital black & white photography