Create a Cool Color Splash Effect

THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPHIC EFFECT you may have seen if you’re friends with any parents on Facebook. An image is drained of color, apart from specific hues, which are injected back into the otherwise monochrome image.

It’s a bit overused—and, if we’re being honest, groan-inducing, especially when applied to photos of newborn babies—but by recreating it, we can gain some insights into how Photoshop works, because it’s possible to do it in a couple different ways, depending on whether you choose to work on the colors involved specifically, by selecting them directly, or just the area you want to work on more generally, by selecting the pixels in a certain area, no matter what color they are.

It’s a relatively simple effect, albeit a striking one, so is something you could achieve in imageediting apps other than Photoshop. And if you can use it to make a new mom smile, then we’ve all made the world a better place. –IAN EVENDEN 1 CHOOSE A PHOTO We’re going to work on a photo of typical city scene here, but you could use anything with a strong, isolated color in it, such as a baby with piercing eyes, or a woman with full, red lips. Whatever you choose, open the image in Photoshop and, for the first of our color isolation methods, head to the “Select” menu, and choose “Color Range” [ Image A]. 2 SELECT COLORS In the window that opens, you have the choice of being able to select colors in a range—reds, say—or by sampling an area with the eyedropper, which functions more or less identically to the main Eyedropper tool in Photoshop. By sampling the yellow cab with the dropper, it appears white in the small preview. You can expand this to the main image by choosing “Grayscale” from the “Selection Preview” drop-down, which makes for a very odd image, but lets you see exactly what you’re selecting. Once you’re happy with what you’ve sampled, click “OK,” and the familiar marching ants of the Photoshop selection now wall off those pixels. You’ll almost certainly select some additional colors that you don’t want by using this method, so use the Quick Selection tool in conjunction with Shift and Alt to add and remove selected areas. 3 EYEDROPPER EXCELLENCE An interlude: Speaking of color selection and eyedroppers, here’s something that blew our collective mind when we found out about it. The Eyedropper tool isn’t confined to Photoshop. It works across your whole monitor, so if you want to sample a color from a web page, you can, just by having the page open, and dragging the tool across from Photoshop. Your color selection must start within Photoshop, but once you’re sampling, you can drag the dropper anywhere on your screen, release, and have the color information sampled to Photoshop. Neat, huh? 4 DECOLORIZE THE BACKGROUND Back to business. Now you want to remove the color from the rest of the image, so invert your selection (“Select > Inverse”), and head to the Layers palette. At the bottom, there’s an icon that looks like a circle divided in half. Part black, part white. Click it, and a menu pops up with all the different Adjustment Layers you can add. Choose “Black White,” and you should instantly get your desired effect. There are still plenty of options to mess around with, though, including some presets (we’ve used High Contrast Blue [ Image B]) and sliders to manually adjust the effect. If the color that remains isn’t as bright as you’d like, bring back the selection (“Select > Reselect,” then “Select > Inverse”), before using the Hue/Saturation Window (“Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation”) to bring out the color more strongly.

5 STEP BACK IN HISTORY The second way of achieving the same effect uses Photoshop’s History Brush and the History palette’s Snapshot ability. Reopen your original image file, and open History (“Window > History”). At the top of the palette, you’ll find an automatically generated Snapshot, probably labeled with the image file name. You can create more at any time using the camera icon at the bottom of the History palette. This is a record of the image at the moment the Snapshot was created. They don’t save with your image file, unfortunately, so be sure not to close and reopen your file while doing this. 6 USE THE SNAPSHOT Your image is probably in RGB color at the moment, so we’re going to remove the color information by going to “Image > Mode > Grayscale,” and clicking “Discard.” Then, we’re going to put it back into a color mode by going to “Image > Mode > RGB Color.” Note that your image stays black and white—the color information that has been discarded is gone forever. But not quite: There’s a Snapshot at the top of the History palette that still remembers the colors. We can bring them back by using the History Brush. Make sure the box to the left of the Snapshot is selected in the History palette, then use the History Brush tool (Y) to paint over the areas to which you want to bring the color back. We’ve painted very sloppily around the taxis to show the effect [ Image C]. 7 CAREFUL COLORING You need to be quite accurate here, because you really only want the taxis to be in color, and not passers-by or the road surface, which has a blue tint. Be patient. Whatever the object you’re re-coloring, you don’t want that color bleeding into the background or other nearby objects. Use a tiny brush and zoom right in if necessary. To make things easier, you may like to select the area you want to color, as while there’s an active selection, you can’t paint outside of it. Feather the edges by a few pixels for a smooth transition using “Select > Modify > Feather.” 8 FINAL TWEAKS You can paint the History Brush state on to a new layer if needed, so the effect can be blended back into the original. To do this, make a new layer, and ensure it’s selected before you begin painting. Save as a PSD to preserve your layers, and export as a JPEG for sharing or printing [ Image D].