Image Editing Tutorial – Selective Monochrome Comments

In CS4 there is a tool to do this in a couple of seconds.

- Open the adjustments panel and click on the finger/slider box on the top left.
- Move the finger over the part of the image you don't want colour in and hold/drag left to dial down the colour.
- Mop up any straggly bits with the sponge tool.

Here, I changed the mode of the "hue saturation" adjustment layer to "Hue" (as opposed to "normal") to retain the yellow of the flowers.

http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/7787/12161imgp0861.jpg

You can play with that adjustment layer's mode and it creates some nice effects.

I know this may be a tall order, but could you start including Paint.net in these tutorials? Even if it's a "there is no comparative feature in Paint.net" it would be nice to see how to do these things with free alternatives

very good read, I was looking over Joose blog from the fireworks tutorial and in it is a photo of a blue car in a carpark with this effect added and I was wondering how to do it and here is a tutorial, like you read my mind lol

@ChaosDefinesOrder: guess you could use GIMP as mentioned that's free and works the same

@Jay: d'oh completely forgot about GIMP, thanks for reminding me!

@Jay - Being me I've found an very simple way of creating this effect (as I am simple lol). I have an account with www.picnik.com but you can do this with the free version. Upload your photo, go to the create tab along the top, click on the effects tab, click on black and white (left hand side). Your picture will turn black and white. Use the paint brush to paint what you want back into colour. Save. Job Done :)

tip: use your mouse wheel to scroll in and out of your photo wherever you hold your cursor over it.

By the way, you can also upload direct from other sites into Picnik (such as Facebook or Flickr) make your changes and then save over the original in your Facebook account. I really recommend this site :)

Cliff's methods will get a better result (and if you get into photography you will want the best results!) but if you want to try this effect for fun or snapshots, Picnik is really good. Actually as a novice I use it wherever I can lol My work copy of CS4 only gets used for layers nowadays ;)

Good stuff. On a totally unrelated note, can anyone explain the difference between the Opacity and Flow settings? I could never work out the difference...

@ joose: I've just been on that site and it is fantastic thanks for the tip, it's perfect for what I was looking to achieve