Selective Coloring in Photoshop

Title: Selective Colouring
Difficulty: Beginner
Time: 15 minutes

What is Selective Colouring?
In the simplest of terms, a part of the picture remains in colour while the rest is in black and white.

How to do it:
Pick a picture, and open it in Photoshop.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

After you have chosen a picture, Click on the Background Layer and duplicate it by pressing Ctrl + J. This keeps your original picture safe in case you need to edit it again, or use a different part of the picture for the selective colouring.

Once you have duplicated the picture, you should see Background Copy in your layer palette.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Now in the tools palette, go ahead and select the Polygonal Lasso Tool (Shortcut: L)
(Usually you will only see the Lasso Tool in this tab when you first open photoshop, To actually get to the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click and hold the small arrow you see, this should bring up the rest of the tools in this particular tab, Alternatively you can use Shift and L to move between the tools in this tab)

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Now on the picture, select the area you want coloured with the help of the Polygonal Lasso Tool, Click once to activate the Polygonal Lasso tool, and then keep on clicking around the areas you want coloured.
In this tutorial, i decided to go with the 'sail'

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Once you have selected the area, end the selection at the same point that you started on, by doing this correctly, you should see a dotted line across the area you chose, this indicates that area of the picture is now selected.
While the area is still selected, press Ctrl J to duplicate it. This should appear as Layer 1.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Now, select the layer Background copy and right below in the layer palette you should see, Adjustments, click and select Hue/Saturation.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Make the Saturation -100, to turn the picture into grey scale/black and white, make sure that the Hue and saturation adjustment is below the ‘Layer 1’ (You can just click and drag layers to place them on top or below the other layers)

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

For extra effect, we can use Curves, to make it look more darker; you can experiment with the settings of the curve to achieve desired results.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]


Final Output:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]


Thats it! Hope this tutorial helped out in certain ways, comment for any questions and feedback, Thanks!