Good morning friends!
I have a super special treat for you today... my first Photoshop tutorial!
Now, understand I do not consider myself a professional (yet) but I do know a few tricks.
One common effect I see a lot is the black and white photos with pops of color, usually done when enhancing the eye color in close up portraits. I'm going to show you an easy way to get those results with some quick and easy steps in Photoshop CS5.
Ready? Set? ...let's do this!
We will start with an image of our choice.
I'm using the lovely Zooey Deschanel for this example:
Open the image in Photoshop (File>Open).
The first thing you want to do is make a copy of the image by right clicking on the background layer and selecting "Duplicate Layer." You want to get in the habit of doing this when you edit all of your photos. This way you aren't making permanent changes to the original image.
You can name it whatever you want, I'm going to stick with the default "Background copy" and hit OK.
With the background copy selected, choose the "Quick selection tool" seen highlighted in my toolbar below.
Next, you want to select the blue eyes so they have marching ants around them (I'm also selecting the red nails in this example for fun).
Some tricks to keep in mind about the Quick Selection tool:
1. If the selection brush size needs to be smaller/larger, use the + and - buttons to adjust. The smaller the size the better control you have of your selection.
2. If you select too much, hold down the Alt/Option button while clicking to deselect mistakes.
3. It doesn't need to be absolutely perfect, but go slow and try to get your selections as close as possible until it looks something like the photo below.
4. Then while everything is selected, right click and choose "Select Inverse"
The "inverse" means everything outside of your selection and you will see the rest of your image surrounded with the marching ants. At this point we want to make the rest of the image black and white so the color of the eyes and nails really pop.
So we're going to go to: Image>Adjustments>Black & White
A box will come up where you can customize the black and white image.
I'm going to stick with the default, but go ahead and mess around if you want with "Preview" checked so you can see the changes as you go along. (Keep in mind you can always go to Window>History and undo any adjustments you've made if you're not loving the outcome.)
Click OK. Everything should still be selected. We want to add more pop to the eyes so we're going to right click on the eye and choose "Select Inverse" again. You should see the selection go back to just the eyes.
Now go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation.
We want to up the saturation a bit just to give the colors even more of a pop.
I increased the saturation to +30, but go ahead and mess around until you are satisfied with the outcome.
The last step is to deselect, so hold down "Command D" or Select>Deselect to get rid of those marching ants... and Voila!
From here, save as a JPG and start showing off your pretty creations!
That was totally easier than you thought right?
I'm going to be doing a few more of these and would love your suggestions, so if you are wanting to know more Photoshop tricks leave me a note in the comments and I will for sure consider them for my next tutorial!
