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Photoshop Help... Black and White with coloured areas.

I have an image of a girl wearing a red coat, i want to make the picture black and white but leave the coat red.

Can anyone help me or direct me to an online tutorial?

Thanks in advance.

Posted by jameshilton on Jan 23, 2008 in Blab | 13 comments

ftapao on Jan 23, 2008

This is actually very easy to do. This tutorial seems to explain it better than I could here.
Good luck!

http://www.mandarindesign.com/tutorials/colorizing.html

nickpixel on Jan 23, 2008

Depending on the level of detail, the easiest way is to select the coat, then go to "Select" -> "Inverse" and then "Image" -> "Adjustments" -> "Desaturate".

The tutorial linked by ftapao is slightly different but basically the same concept.

josie on Jan 23, 2008

Pretty much you're gonna need 2 layers of the same picture - one of them coloured, the other one b&w. The last one must be on top.

Then select the coat in the b&w picture and erase it, so the red coat of the last layer will appear.

Is it clear? That's the way I'd do it.. ;)

jameshilton on Jan 24, 2008

Thanks guys,

Does anyone have any more ideas?

soprano on Jan 24, 2008

Select all but the coat, then use Hue/Saturation to make the saturation value 0 (or maybe it's -100, I can't remember).

jameshilton on Jan 24, 2008

Thanks soprano, that works well. (Its -100)

nickpixel on Jan 24, 2008

That's what "Desaturate" does.

Jen on Jan 24, 2008

or you can desaturate the entire photo and then select the coat only. Create a new layer, flood fill the selection with red and mess with colorizing/transparency options.

It just depends on exactly what look you're after.

soprano on Jan 24, 2008

@nickpixel: Sorry, didn't see your post. Well, you might also want to use mine if you want to otherwise adjust the color.

jameshilton on Jan 24, 2008

@nickpixel, sorry i must have pressed the wrong button last night! Desaturate works very well also.

jameshilton on Jan 24, 2008

Now that I know how to do that I will explain what I want to do. sugarcoatedwar.com is a web site to promote my brothers book "Sugar Coated War". In the last paragraph on THIS page a little girl in a red coat is mentioned, i think it would look good to have a picture of a little girl wearing a red coat in B&W but retaining the red of the coat in the bottom right corner. Another problem i have is that i dont have a picture of that little girl! I guess I could use a picture of any little girl really but i so far havnt been able to find one.

supertux on Jan 24, 2008

I know that you have already received a few methods of desaturating parts of an image, but I have another way- whenever you want to isolate one single colored object, you can goto Select -> Color Range, and then select the shade of red that you want to select with the eyedropper. I had to do this kind of thing for my film festival entry for the Apple Insomnia Film Festival. I used after effects to track an apple and make it color, while the rest of the clip is black and white- similar to in the Giver.

nickpixel on Jan 24, 2008

soprano, jameshilton, my bad. I didn't mean for that to sound so short. I wasn't trying to imply any one way was better than the other, just that the desaturate command was the equivalent of setting saturation to -100.

supertux, that vid is pretty cool. Do you have a YouTube channel (or similar) where you show off your work?

jameshilton, I'm not sure what you have in mind but here is a good place to start.