saturation/desaturation

[twinma]

can someone please help me out?
Iam trying to figure out how to saturate a black and white photo with out having to color it in by hand.
thank you :confused:

[Grant]

Not sure what you mean buy saturate a B&W. But if you want to change the tonality of your image you have to set the image to RGB even it is black and white to get the most of the tools to react to your image. Once you have done that you will find that some tool are colour specific but many will change the tone of you image.

If that is not what you want please let us know a bit more.

[twinma]

I wanted to take a color photo and change the saturation and it to only have a pacific itam in the photo in color. Iam not sure what it is called. Iam sorry I am new to this. I have an example of a photo I am trying to change: I have a photo of a little girl holding a pink flower close to her face and I want the little girl to be in black and white but the flower to be pink. how would I do that? thanks

[Pauline]

Hi Twinma and welcome. I know exactly how to do this when I have elements open in front of me, but thought I'd better reference my book to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Open your image.
Press the letter D (default) to set your foreground color to black.
Press the letter B (brush) and go to the options bar and change the MODE pop-up from Normal to Color.
Choose a large soft brush from the brush picker.
Start painting and as you pain the color will dissappear leaving just grayscale. Paint everything except for the object you want to remain in color.

That is courtesy of Scott Kelby's book, "down and dirty tricks" Not the way I normally do it.

Method 2
Open your image
Ctrl J to make a copy of it
Open a new adjustment layer (the one with the half black half white circle in the layers palette) and choose hue/saturation. Drag the saturation to the left to desaturate your photo.
You will be left with a grey scale image.
Now click on the layer mask to the right and paint with black where you want the colour to show. (this will hide the grey scale effect and show your colour.)

[twinma]

Iam still not understanding that. I had tried it and at the last step on option 2 you lost me. I can see where the layer color bar is. thanks:confused:

[kayser]

Hi- I THINK Pauline is referring to the layer mask created when you created the new adjustment later. See the picture below- I've circled it. Hope this helps.


http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/1033/a1excopy4ob.th.jpg (http://img133.imageshack.us/my.php?image=a1excopy4ob.jpg)

[CarolLHB]

Hi Twin-welcome!

The adjustment layer that Pauline is referring to is the white rectange that appears in the layers palette when you create a new adjustmant layer. (see Kay's photo)

To get this, at the top of your layers palette there is a circle that is half black and half white, When you click on it a drop down menu will appear with several options. Go down to where it says "Hue/Saturation" and click. A dialogue box with sliders will appear. In the dialogue box there is a slider that says "saturation". Drag that all the way to the left and you'll see all the color in your photo disappear, leaving you with a grayscale image, click ok. Now in your layers palette you will see a layer (should be highlighted) that has two rectangles in in, the one on the right is plain white. Click on the white one and you should see a line appear around it which tells you it's active-this is your layer mask.

Now, with the layer mask active, go to the tools palette and selct a brush-large soft edge for large areas, smaller or harder edge brush for detailed area. Make sure your foreground color is black, and paint the area that you want to be in color with black, This will reveal the color for you.

Hope this helps-BTW, this technique is usually referred to as selective coloring.
:)

[kayser]

Carol- That was a great, detailed reply. I could barely manage a screen capture...

[CarolLHB]

Well, by 6:14AM I had already had two cups of cofee:D :D

Thanks-it felt kind of good to be able to help for a change:o

[twinma]

thank you for your help. I will have to see if I can so that. Thanks again. :)