Black, White, Color

How to achieve Black/White with Color Detail

General Image Editing
-----------------------
PAUL from New Orleans, LA 70058, using WINDOW XP with P4, 2.8 gHZ, writes in with:

[Quote:] I need help on this project: I have just took a portrail picture of a beautiful woman and I let her to see the display through the computer's screen; she loves it but she wants me to make the picture in Black and White the exception of her 2-eyes and her lip (In Red). Please help me step by step in this project with your expertise to have this picture achived the way it is. Your help is greatly appreciated and accountable toward Photoshop CS great friendly help. Thank you very much.

Reply:

Easy... see our full tutorial Paint to Black & White which is actually for Photoshop Elements, but works great in Photoshop as well.

Comments

[ann]

i want to do my black and white to the color picture

[WelshBaloney]

I would use the lasso tool to carefully select the elements that you want to retain as color - you may even want to feather the selection by a couple of pixels if it looks better.
Once you have these selected, invert the selection so that everything except the eyes/lips are selected, then desaturate the layer. The portrait will be B&W except for the eyes/lips.
If desaturating doesn't give you the best B&W (probably won't), then an alternative approach would be to duplicate your portrait layer, convert the background to B&W and then on the duplicated (color) layer, select the eyes/mouth with the lasso as before, invert and hit delete to get rid of everything except the (color) eyes and mouth.

[sean]

i think the easiest way to do so would be to select the areas of detail separatly, save them to a new project(just a blank background) make the original picture grayscale then copy and paste the detailed color areas back in place.. im not sure if it will have the desired effect but it should work