Color-Pop: Another Easy Tutorial

I’ve been getting several emails asking about another little trick people see online from time to time: a black and white image with a single area of color (eyes, a book, a car, etc.). This is a REALLY simple “trick” to perform in Photoshop, and all you need is a steady hand and some patience, depending upon how complex the color area will be. So grab yourself an image to play with (you can grab mine here), fire-up Photoshop, and let’s learn to Color Pop.

Below you see my source image — one I’ve used before. What I’m going to do is make everything black and white, except for the pink flower.



The first step is to convert the image to black and white by adding a new Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer: Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Channel Mixer (here’s my black and white conversion tutorial). Make sure you check the Monochrome check box, and set the RGB values to 30%, 59%, and 11%. Once that’s done, your layers palette should look like this:



Now the fun begins! What we’re going to do is “paint out“ the adjustment layer modifications over the flower, allowing the color to come through. To do this, press “D” in Photoshop to set your default foreground and background colors to black and white — and make sure you have black as the foreground. Next, click the Brush tool and select a brush size that will allow you to do a few big sweeps through the majority of the flower area. Now, start painting and you’ll begin to see something like this:



After you get the majority of the flower area done, you’ll have to start zooming into the image and reducing the brush size to grab all the nooks and crannies around the edges. If you make a mistake, simply switch the foreground color to white and paint over the mistake — it will “erase” the color and take it back to black and white.

After a few minutes, you’ll end up having an image that looks something like this:



There are a few other methods for doing this, but in my opinion, this technique offers the most flexibility — and it’s easy to do. Depending upon how comfortable you are with freehand painting, you could also use the selection tool to outline your to-be-color-popped area and then paint, ensuring you don’t go out of the lines (and it helps get the tight areas).