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Photoshop: Color Highlights in Black & White Images

TMO Quick Tip - Photoshop: Color Highlights in Black & White Images

by , 7:30 AM EDT, October 3rd, 2007

Black and white or full color photos can be striking on their own, but mixing the two draws your viewer's eye exactly where you want it -- and with dramatic effect. It's actually really simple to create this striking effect in Photoshop without much effort. All you need is a color image.


This is an easy effect to create in Photoshop.

For this example, I spent some time trolling through iStockphoto and came up with an image of a woman holding balloons. I'll Highlight a balloon, and leave everything else black and white.


Start with a color image.

  • Start by opening a color image in Photoshop.

  • Create a new Adjustment Layer.
  • Choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation, and move the Saturation slider as far to the left as it will go to make your color image black and white. Click OK.


Move the Saturation slider to the left to pull the color out of your image.

When you create an Adjustment layer, it automatically creates a Layer Mask. We'll use that to add some color back in the highlight area.

  • Select the Brush tool.

  • Use the Brush tool to "paint" where you want to see color.
  • Make sure your selected color is black because that will let us hide, or paint out, the parts of the layer we want to see color through. White has the opposite effect. Use it to add back to your mask and hide the color areas.

  • Color shows through when you paint black on the Adjustment layer mask.
  • With the Adjustment layer mask still selected, paint where you want the color to show through. If you make a mistake, switch to white to paint back in and hide the color you don't want to see.


The original image (left) and final (right).

The great thing about this technique is that it doesn't harm your original image. Since all of your changes are on an adjustment layer, the original photo remains untouched.


Jeff Gamet is TMO's Morning Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.

if you have tips or tricks to share, or Mac-related questions you want answered.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:Guest
Subject: FREAK'IN AWESOME TRICKS ... PLEASE KEEP THEM COMING!

Thanks for sharing this info!

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Thanks!

yeah i really appreciate these tips. great stuff.

Close Name:MBS Posts: 660 Joined: 25 Jul 2002
Subject: Can you do this in Elements?

Just wondering because that's all I have. Elements 3 to be exact.

Close Name:gslusher Posts: 2088 Joined: 13 Nov 2002
Subject: Re: Can you do this in Elements?

Quote
MBS wrote:
Just wondering because that's all I have. Elements 3 to be exact.


The easy way to find out would be to try it.

Close Name:Guest
Subject:

can you use this on iPhoto?

Close Name:gslusher Posts: 2088 Joined: 13 Nov 2002
Subject:

Quote
Anonymous wrote:
can you use this on iPhoto?


iPhoto isn't really an image editor. It has a few nice features and is easy to use, but it lacks a selection tool, which you need for this. You really need a good image editor. Graphic Converter will do SOME editing (and is EXCELLENT for batch-processing images--e.g., scaling them for web pages). The best I've seen for the money are Color It! ($60) and PhotoShop Elements ($89). (The links are to the VersionTracker pages, where you can read comments. There are links on each page to the developers' sites.) Color It! is higher-rated than Photoshop Elements, despite costing 2/3 as much. It is a real bargain. It's not Universal Binary (neither is Photoshop Elements; a UB version is in the works), but it reportedly works very nicely in Rosetta on Intel Macs. Color It! is quite a bit more efficient than Photoshop Elements and it can use MOST OS X Photoshop plug-ins. (One I haven't tried yet is the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in. Now that I have a Canon 30D that can take RAW photos, I'll try it out.)

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