Color Mixed With Black & White

Color Mixed With Black & White

by William Lulow

Here’s a neat little effect you can achieve fairly easily, by no means new, but cool anyway. It consists of highlighting one element of a photograph in color while the rest of the image remains in Black & White.

First, find a suitable image where you can draw a mask easily. In this case, I chose a wedding shot. You mask out the part of the image you want to remain in color while the remainder of the image will lose all its color information. Follow this procedure:

1. Select the part of the image you want to be in color
2. Make a mask for that part. I usually use the magnetic lasso selection tool.
3. Use the “inverse” selection tool to mask everything else in the image.
4. Under the “image” menu in Photoshop, choose “adjustments” then “saturation” from the drop-down menu and set it to “0”. Click “OK.” This will make the now selected part of the image lose all of its color information. You will be left with that portion of your image that you selected in black & white.
5. Save the image as a JPEG.

It’s really that simple and can add an interesting depth to your images.

This provides a method of calling more attention to the portion of the image that you choose to leave in color.

Here’s another example:

When choosing images to use this technique, it’s usually best to have the portion you wish to remain in color fairly solid. If you try to use trees or intricate objects, making an effective mask can become rather complicated and take quite a bit of time and patience. For this image of the truck, I first used the magnetic lasso to select the basic shapes of the barn and the truck. I then had to go back and re-select some parts of the image that were more difficult to select and re-edit them with the Hue setting set to zero. So, the more solid the image you wish to select for color, the easier the process is. Also, if you get good at using the magnetic lasso tool, that too, makes this an easier process.