Selective Desaturation is the process of turning the majority of an image into black and white whilst keeping certain, pre-chosen areas in colour to highlight them and add emphasis. It makes your images more unique and interesting, allowing you to focus the attention on a key area of the photography – they also look pretty cool too! You can choose to keep a certain subject in colour, (like the bus rushing part above), or choose one colour in the photograph and convert the rest to black and white as seen here (please click any of the images to enlarge them):
Most of us are don’t have the time do be doing complex artistic effects to our photographs, but the great thing about this process is that it can be done very quickly and with minimal knowledge and effort. With this in mind, all the images seen in this blog took under 2 minutes to make and require little knowledge of photo editing software.
So here is how you do it. I use Adobe Photoshop but there are loads of photo editing software packages (including many fee ones) that you can use and the process in basically the same in al of them. In this example I am taking an image of a Bald Eagle that I took and simply keeping the eye in colour.
Step 1: Open the image in your editing software
Step 2: Make a rough copy of the area that you want to keep in colour and paste it on top of the main image. Here you can see I’ve made a copy of the eye area of the photograph
Step 3: Convert the main image to black and white but keep the copied area of the photograph in colour
Step 4: Zoom in and tidy up the area by deleting unwanted parts of the full colour layer using your ‘eraser tool’ of equivalent.
This image actually took me just around one minute to complete and I am far from an expert. The end result really focuses the attention on the eye of this magnificent bird. It really is that easy to do, I encourage you to give it a try.
Copyright Journography 2012
Once you’ve practiced this simple method, it’s easy to get really creative with it to produce some dramatic results! The next image was produced in exactly the same ways as above. Each heart, and the bra was copied before turning the main image black and white. It was then just a question of zooming in and cutting out each heart and the bra line neatly. Takes much longer (you should allow a couple of hours depending on the complexity) but it’s not harder at all
Copyright Journography 2012
Get desaturating! Mark the Moment!
Google+