Selective Color Tutorials

If you’ve ever wondered how to create a black & white image in Photoshop with only a certain part of the picture in color (i.e. a subject’s lips, a bouquet of flowers, one pear out of a hundred, etc)?  This set of post processing tutorials explains just how to do that using a Photoshop tool called selective color.

You can use the selective color tool for many basic post processing tweaks such as saturating or desaturating parts of an image to bring attention to them, correct minor color casts, and more.  The following video tutorials demonstrate how to use this tool simply and easily to get you selectively coloring images in no time.

Photoshop Basics: Selective Color – WCI Pixel Podcast

If you can only watch one tutorial on the selective color tool in Photoshop, this should be it.  All the basics are explained, including what the tool actually does, tips for how to most effectively alter the colors in an image, and how to keep the colors in your photo balanced and looking realistic after you’ve modified them.  The instructions are clear and her voice is quite calm and soothing.  She uses a gorgeous photograph of a forest in the late autumn when the leaves are turning yellow, and another image of a pub in Germany, which both very clearly show how selective coloring can really improve your pics.

Selective Coloring Made Simple

This is a very basic, effective tutorial where the author converts an image of a bright yellow sunflower to black & white, then paints the original color back on to the flower, but not the background.  He uses a Wacom tablet to more accurately paint the color back into the image, but it’s not necessary.

Selective Color Tutorial in Photoshop CS3

The selective color tool can be a great asset to wedding photography post processing.  In this tutorial, you see how to take a lovely image of a bride in her wedding dress holding a bouquet of flowers, convert it to black and white, then selectively paint the color back into the bouquet to make the color pop.  It only takes a couple minutes to accomplish and can be a nice touch for wedding portraiture.

Selective Color in Photoshop (plus a quick bit about curves)

Not only is this a fantastic selective coloring tutorial, the author also explains a bit about how curves actually work in Photoshop, and how to use them.  He starts off with a photograph of a bumblebee flight around brightly colored purple flowers, and applies many tweaks: saturates the image, uses selective color to desaturate and color the flowers differently so the bee sticks out, and uses curves to alter brightness.  This video tutorial also shows some techniques using LAB color (as opposed to RGB color).

Glamour Color Pop fx: Photoshop

I saved the best for last.  This video uses a complex and powerful technique to select the model’s yellow bikini, then uses that selection to selectively color it while leaving the rest of the image black & white.  By creating and editing the color channels and painting different colors into them, he creates a very accurate selection around the model’s clothes (instead of using any of the normal selection tools).  While the method he uses to select the girl’s swimsuit seemed a bit too complex for this task, it is a very powerful technique that can make difficult selections quite easy (i.e. for when you need to change someone’s hair color).

That finishes up the tutorials on selective coloring in Photoshop.  Practice these for a short time and you’ll be a selective coloring pro very quickly.  If you found the post useful, please leave a comment!