333 Selectively converting a photo to black & white

Hey gang this is Deke McCullen. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week I'll show you how to selectively convert portions of a photograph to black and white and leave the remaining portions more colorful then ever. Specifically we'll take this bowl full of cherries and we'll essentially punish the non cherries. By robbing them of their saturation and reward the cherries with more color than ever. And you can do this with your own non-cherry based photographs, as well. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

All right, so here's that original version of the photograph about which you can learn more at fotolia.com/deke. And here's the final version of the image in which I have amped up the saturation of the cherries but I have taken the saturation out of everything else about this image. So the first thing we want to do as opposed to masking the cherries or anything along those lines. We want to create a black and white layer. So go ahead and drop down to the black and white circle at the bottom of the layers panel. And choose black and white from the list.

And, then, at this point, you might want to go ahead and grab the Targeted Adjustment tool, so that you can drag inside the image to, for example, if I drag to the right in the cherries, I'll brighten the reds. And if I drag to the left, I will darken up. The reds considerably as you're seeing here. But what I did was I started things off by clicking on the auto button just to get my bearings. And then I ended up experimenting with some settings. I took the reds value ultimately down to 50, which is darkening up the cherries like crazy.

But do bear in mind that we're going to be masking that particular adjustment mostly away. And then I tab to the yellows value. I took it up to 35. I took the greens value down to negative 50. And I took everything else, cyans, blues, and magentas down to negative 200. And the reason is that I really wanted to darken up this image. If I hide the properties panel for a moment you can see that the original image is bordering on overexposed. And so I really wanted to darken things up, and create a specific mood.

Which is why I took things so very dark. All right, now we want mask the cherries, and you do that by turning that adjustment layer off. And then you want to go up to the select menu and choose a color range command. And notice this keyboard shortcut Ctrl > Shift > Alt> G. Command-Shift-Option-G on the Mac. That's my invention. It's part of my D-Keys collection. And you can create your own shortcuts, using the Keyboards Shortcuts command under the Edit menu. And I just happen to think the world of this command. It's so great, so easy to use. And it's so much better than, for example, the Magic Wand, for selecting areas of color.

So I'll go ahead and choose the command to bring up the Color Range dialog box. And then what you want to do is you want to use your Eye Dropper as a kind of Magic Wand. You want to click on the color that you want to select. And then shift + drag around some other reds. And you want to stick with the dark reds and the medium reds. You don't want to drift too far into the highlights here. Notice how we have this very dinky little preview right there. What we're seeing is a mask. So anywhere that's white will be selected, and anywhere that's black will be deselected.

But you're going to want to have a better view of that mask by switching selection preview from none to grayscale. And that way, you can Shift+click in some of these other regions to see if you can add to the cherries. And then what I did, is I took the fuzziness value up to 100, and what that's doing, is, it's incorporating more neighboring colors. That is the colors that neighbor those colors that you clicked on as well as those that you shift drag over. And at some point you're going to end up with an effect more or less like this, which is exactly what we want.

So, when it looks more or less like this, you don't have to get it exactly right, because there is no such thing, where this image is concerned, go ahead and click OK in order to create that selection outline. Then turn the black and white layer back on. Now, if I were to drop down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the panel and click on it, then I would mask away the cherries. And so you can see that we now have these very dark cherries here, these borderline black cherries. Along with the green bowl and the green background. That’s not what I want. So I press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac, in order to restore my selection outline.

I want the opposite of that. So I’ll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on the add layer mask icon, and that goes ahead and masks away that selection. All right now let's say you didn't get enough of the cherries, we're losing all these highlights right here. If that's the case then just go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac in order to undo the addition of that layer mask and press Ctrl+D or Cmd+D on the Mac to deselect the image, turn off the black and white layer. And then return to the select menu and again choose color range and it will bring back up the last selection you created so you can begin work there.

And apparently I need to select more of the cherries, though not that much more, so I'll press Ctyrol+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac and Shift+Click right about there. Let's say in order to add to the selection incrementally. What I don't want to do is select the table. If you end up selecting too much, just press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on the Mac. And again, remember anywhere that's white, that's what's getting selected. Anywhere that's black, that's not getting selected. And then go ahead and click OK. And we'll try this again.

I'll turn on the black and white layer and then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac, and I will click on the outlayer mask icon at the bottom of the panel in order to create this effect here. Now that effects a pretty great effect actually, except that we have too much in the way of these harsh edged details. So with the Layer Mask now selected inside the layers panel, make sure that black and white thumbnail is active. It should have a double border around it. In which case, go up to the filter menu, choose blur and then choose Gaussian blur. And you can experiment with the radius value that you like.

But in my case I'm going to go with a radius of six. So if you had more pixels inside of your image, if it's a higher resolution image, then you would increase the radius value. If you have fewer pixels, which is difficult to imagine because this is a pretty low RES image, then you would reduce the radius value. All right, now I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change. The next thing that we want to do is take the existing colors and magnify their saturation. And so, I'm going to drop down to the black and white circle at the bottom of the layers panel. Make sure that that black and white layer is active.

So that you create your next layer on top of it. And then go ahead and click and choose Vibrance. And I am looking for a Vibrance value of 88, so I'm really going to crank that guy up there, and I want the saturation value to be 20, so that we have some extremely saturated cherries. At which point I'll go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change and I'll hide the properties panel by clicking on that double arrow icon. And then I figured this image is ultimately worthy of an album cover which is why I have this type ready and waiting for you.

And all you need to do if you have access to the sample file is turn on this layer called Type. And that, friends, is how you not only preserve but also magnify the saturation of certain colors in an image while sending the rest of the image to black and white here inside Photoshop,. All right, if you like that one, you're going to like next week even better. We're going to take this once in a lifetime photograph, which just so happens to be crooked and I cut off one of my youngest son's feet, and we are going to uncrop it and restore it in post.

It's a Photoshop miracle. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.