Enhanced Colour Effect - Red Rose in a B&W photo?

Hey Everyone!

Just curious about how I could achieve a particular effect in either Photoshop CS2 or Google's Picasa. I'd like to take a colour photograph, convert it to black and white, but still have one particular colour accentuated in the photograph. For example, in a photo of a person holding a red rose, I would like to have the entire photo in B&W with the exception of the red rose.

Please let me know how I could go about getting this done!

Thanks in advance,

Mordy

[Zone]

Hi Mordy and welcome to the forums.

The term is called selective colouring.

This is how I do it in PSE.

1. Open the colour image you want to edit.
2. Create a duplicate layer and copy the original picture to it.
3. Create a monochrome image of the new layer (there are many ways to do this so choose your prefered method) and using the eraser tool rub through to the colour image underneath.
4. Finally flatten the image.

There are other methods so I'm sure someone will come a long and tell you there preference.

[Ray]

Many ways to do this but one easy way to do this in PS is to use the history brush. Simply use your preferred method to turn your photo to B+W (destaturate probably quickest for purpose of this experiment) then selcect the history brush and simply paint over the rose. This has the effect of reversing the last action (desaturation) in just the area you paint over thereby restoring the original colour of the rose.

I picked up a couple of small stock images and changed them very quickly to demo that it is very simple.

Ray

[Pirate!!]

Aparently, this is the definitive guide to selective colouring. Scroll down.

[BIGRED]

Hi

don't know if this is a feature on all canon cameras but there is a setting on the canon ixus 800 is to do this effect in camera , i've been playing about with it all weekend, its called colour accent or something like that, it pictures it produces have worked remarkably well !!!

Hey Everyone!

Thank you for all the tips and advice!! Pulling together all these ideas and advice, I was able to get the effect that I was going for with relative ease! I will also keep digging away at some of the resources that I've arrived at through the forum to set-up some even better effects

Cheers,

Mordy