Bit of Fun: Selective Color

Being on a break from work but having a newborn and a 2 year old has not let me have a lot of free time this past week or so but as I have a new camera (Canon EOS 400D) I decided I could combine a few things.

1) Taking photos of my kids and 2) playing around with some graphics.

1) Taking photos is easy I've well over 13,000 inside of flickr already not all of which are public or even available to my friends but there are lots there. So this past week I've taken almost 500 photos of the two of them an several other things in the garden.



This one caught my eye for a nice little experiment with "Selective Color" a fun thing to do with photos and gives that extra special little touch. It's also something pretty easy to do.

You need a graphics program that does layers (I use Gimp and Paint Shop Pro), basically just open the photo to get started.

• Open Photo
  
• Choose to "duplicate layer" which will make a duplicate of the photo but on a new layer
  
• Now alter that new layer to "Grayscale" to give the black and white look
  
• Now using the "freehand" select tool, zoom in and careful start to cut away one of the items you want to bring back "in color"
  
• Once you have selected what you want just choose to "Edit - Cut" this will remove the selected area from the black and white layer (the new one we created) and you will see the "color" portion from the layer below that one (the original layer)
  
• Now repeat until you are done
  
• Now flatten the layers down and save as a new copy
  

A total new look to an already cool photo.