"Colour Accent" effect, please help

Fiend-Foe

Hi all,

I used to have a canon ixus 70. It had a colour accent mode that would allow you to select a colour, when you shot the picture everything else would be black and white.

See the attached images for an example.

My new camera doesn't have this feature and it is an effect I really like. I'm a total noob when it comes to photoshop. Would anybody please be able to tell me how I can get this effect using photoshop, GIMP or any other software?

Thanks guys...

Zillah

Off the top of my head for photoshop:

1 - Use the lasso tool to select a chunk of the colour you want to keep.
2 - Select -> Similar
3 - Repeat Step 2 as neccessary. Eventually you should have a selection of all the areas to keep coloured.
4 - Select -> Inverse
5 - Select -> Feather with a strength or 1 or 2 depending on the image size (not an essential step, do it if the line between the colour and B&W section looks too obvious or abrupt)
6 - Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate

I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a more direct way of doing this though.

EDIT: Yeah the "Replace Colour" option is a fantastic tool for selecting areas of a particular colour but I can't work out how to invert the selection,.

Fiend-Foe

Cool thanks, I'll give it a go.

It sucks, it was so much handier being able to do it directly on the camera while shooting.

Thanks for your help...

5uspect

There are lots of ways to to that in Photoshop depending on the type of image you have and the result you want.

If you just want to replicate the algorithm in your camera you could create an action in Photoshop. I would use the colour channels as this is likely what your camera did.
Use the inverse of the colour channel of the colour you want (you may need to switch to CMYK etc) to mask the B&W image.

Fiend-Foe

5uspect wrote: »

There are lots of ways to to that in Photoshop depending on the type of image you have and the result you want.

If you just want to replicate the algorithm in your camera you could create an action in Photoshop. I would use the colour channels as this is likely what your camera did.
Use the inverse of the colour channel of the colour you want (you may need to switch to CMYK etc) to mask the B&W image.

I'm a total beginner with Photoshop, so I have no idea how to go about what you have just said. I'll play around a little and see if I can find out what you mean.

Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated!

Fiend-Foe

Zillah wrote: »

Off the top of my head for photoshop:

1 - Use the lasso tool to select a chunk of the colour you want to keep.
2 - Select -> Similar
3 - Repeat Step 2 as neccessary. Eventually you should have a selection of all the areas to keep coloured.
4 - Select -> Inverse
5 - Select -> Feather with a strength or 1 or 2 depending on the image size (not an essential step, do it if the line between the colour and B&W section looks too obvious or abrupt)
6 - Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate

I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a more direct way of doing this though.

EDIT: Yeah the "Replace Colour" option is a fantastic tool for selecting areas of a particular colour but I can't work out how to invert the selection,.

That worked out pretty nicely, thanks again!

5uspect

Colour channels are very useful in Photoshop.
Here is a guide:
http://www.sketchpad.net/channels1.htm
and here
http://www.khulsey.com/photoshop_tutorials/photoshop_channels.html
Basically a colour image is a combination of three grayscale images which combine to provide colour. These three images provide the Red, Blue and Green elements of the photo and therefore a good degree of many colours (but not all colours).

In these three grayscale images bright areas correspond to bright red green or blue and dark areas to dark colours. A white spot in all three channels is white while a bright spot in the red channel but not in the green or blue is red.

Fiend-Foe

5uspect wrote: »

Colour channels are very useful in Photoshop.
Here is a guide:
http://www.sketchpad.net/channels1.htm
and here
http://www.khulsey.com/photoshop_tutorials/photoshop_channels.html
Basically a colour image is a combination of three grayscale images which combine to provide colour. These three images provide the Red, Blue and Green elements of the photo and therefore a good degree of many colours (but not all colours).

In these three grayscale images bright areas correspond to bright red green or blue and dark areas to dark colours. A white spot in all three channels is white while a bright spot in the red channel but not in the green or blue is red.

Thats great thanks!

I reckon there will be a lot of experimentation with this stuff for me this weekend...

sheesh

I would select colour range and adjust the fuzziness to expand the selection then feather the selection