Colorful Thursdays: Combining color and black and white

Although it’s starting to go out of style, many couples wanted a few images in their wedding photography where there was a selected area of color and the rest in black and white. Some wanted their bouquets in color while they were in black and white, others wanted people in color and backgrounds in black and white, and so on. This can be a really interesting thing to do, and there’s many ways to do it. Here’s how to do it the easy way.

Brad took this image at one of our weddings this summer. We’re going to make it so only the pink flowers are in color. For those of you who are interested in doing this, I’d suggest you also make any greenery attached to flowers in color - it looks better. But for this example, pink makes our point clear!

First, go to your Layers palette. Click and drag your Background layer to the New Layer button (shown below) to make a copy of it.

Now your Layers palette should look like this:

Select the bottom Background layer. We’re going to make some changes to it. Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue & Saturation (otherwise known as Ctrl+U).

A window will pop up. Click the Saturation slider and slide it all the way to the left. This will desaturate your Background layer, turning it into black and white.

Although your image won’t look black and white because the top layer (”Background copy”) is still in color, the Background layer has desaturated. If you look in your layers palette, like in the picture above, you can see that it’s now in black and white.

Select the top layer, “Background copy”. Now we’re going to erase all of the parts around the pink flowers. First, select the eraser tool. You should have a low hardness on it. The diameter depends upon the level of detail that you’ll be going in and erasing. If there are lots of little bumps that you’re erasing around, or some very tight corners, use a smaller brush. If it’s a large, smooth area, you can get away with using a larger brush.

Click on the image where you want to erase. As you drag your brush around, you’ll notice that the black and white layer underneath appears!

Here’s what the Background Copy layer will look like when you’re finished, if you have the Background layer hidden:

Now, I did a pretty sloppy job, so I would then go back and do more detail around the parts that I missed. Here’s the finished product:

Tomorrow is the last in our series of “How-to”s for Photoshop this week. Leave a note in the comments if there are other techniques you’d like to learn how to do!