Spot coloring for the first time
 

Here's my original one of my gf:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~elbailey/Picture2.JPG

many many hours later I finally get what I wanted (her in grayscale and her stuffed toy in color)

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~elbai...re%20copy2.JPG

then a few more times tweaking to get the right parts colored and grayscale along with some filters:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~elbailey/diffuse2.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~elbailey/bwblur2.JPG


and my personal fave:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~elbailey/bwbetter2.JPG

Cool.

Qpid, what method did you use to desaturate certain parts of the image? I've got a great method that shouldn't have taken hours (at least it doesn't now that I've gotten better at it)

Edit: Forgot to mention...it looks friggin' great.

well i couldn't figure out how to do it for the life of me so it took a few hours of research and trial and error to figure out a method:

I lassoed the outline of the dog, then chose the inverse selection then readjusted where the lasso fell to avoid as much of her shirt and skin as possible

once I figured that out it only took around 30min of monkeying around :)

how do yo do it

Here's the thing. Copy and paste the entire image on top of itself, so that you have two layers of the same image. Desaturate the top image, then use the eraser tool to bring the color image from behind through. Works wonders, and it's a lot easier than what I tried the first few times.

Lemme know if you need any clarification.

hey qpid, looks good! :)

i spent some of yesterday fooling around with a not so fabulous photo & came up with this, which isn't perfection either, but i am now tired of futzing with it. :lol:
http://www.hasfurrychildren.com/hfc_.../elroy2yrs.jpg

if you want to see it with a background image, atm it is my index page http://www.hasfurrychildren.com/

(yeah, i don't maintain a proper website, just the index page update... occasionally)

haha.. awesome.. I've used the technique on the eye's photographs I used to do.. :D

Nice work qpid

This may help a bit too. I've found that after I desaturate all or parts of an image, it usually needs some contrast boost. Go to image>adjustments and use either levels or the brightness/contrast sliders or both.

I know what you mean, you can easily get lost in an image for hours trying to get every detail perfect.

interesting, never messed with a pic like that in photoshop. Ill have to give it a try. cool.

would that mess up the non-desaturated parts

No man. This is while you still have everything lassoed.

When you lasso something, and then goof around, the only thing that's affected is what's inside your lasso. Or outside of it, if you inverted. It's so cool, the lasso is like a force field!

Here's an example qpid.

Now by no means am I a PS expert, but some basic stuff can be quick and easy. On this I just lassoed the flags, hit inverse, and desaturated the rest of the photo. Goofed around with levels to adjust contrast and brightness. Then, while still on inverse, played with the color balance sliders to get a nice sepia tone. Then went off inverse and bumped up the saturation of the flags a little bit. I think the whole process took about 5 minutes.

Play around with this program and you'll learn something new constantly.


http://img4.photobucket.com/albums/0...pia_150dpi.jpg

i get it, i was thinking you were trying to say if i did it the other way (copy image over itself, desaturate, erase)