Special Effects
The Sports section of the January 26, 2009 edition of the Arizona Republic carried a picture of the Arizona Cardinal quarterback, Kurt Warner. The artist, Rob Schumacher, had added some nice effects to the photo. He took all the image, except Kurt Warner, and changed it into a black and white photo - leaving Warner in color. Then Schumacher added a black and white border to the image for the finishing art work.
Adding Special Effects to Photos
The basic process that I recommend following to acheive this color/black& white effect is as follows.
1. Open the photo.
2. Add a Hue/Saturation layer and decrease the Saturation to zero. This turns the whole photo to Black and White. Now, because you just added an adjustment layer, it has a mask which is now all white. This allows the Hue/Sat layer to remove all the color.
3. What we want to do is remove the Hue/Sat effect from the part of the image we want to remain in color. To do this, select the Brush Tool, make the Foreground color Black, click on the mask in the Hue/Sat layer, and move over the main image and paint the figure on the image where you want to bring back the color. Painting black on the mask will bring out the original color.
4. To add the frame, select Image > Resize > Canvas Size, put a check mark in the box for Relative and enter 1 inch in the width and height boxes. Be sure your Background color is white, and click OK. This expands the image canvas with a white border of 1 inches all around.
5. Use the Rectangular selection tool and select the original rectangular image; choose Select > Inverse to make your selection go around the new canvas area.
6. Add a New Layer. Fill the inverted selection with Black using Edit > Fill Layer and choosing the Foreground color (assuming the Foreground color is set to black).
7. Choose a Brush tool, set your foreground color to White and use the brush to paint white streaks along the edge of the frame.
Practice Images
Try the black and white/color technique on these following images.
The image links to a larger jpg file.
The image links to a little larger jpg file (not much, but a little).
Additional Images with an Arizona Challenge
Photos taken during the daytime in Arizona typically have a large range of tones in the pictures. That pushes the capability of any camera's sensor. So we can help the camera improve the image using Photoshop Elements. I will follow a simple process to improve the images.
1. Open the image.
2. Duplicate the Background Layer and on the new layer copy, select Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Shadows/Highlights. Move the sliders to lighten the dark areas and change the Midtone contrast as necessary. (You might even have to darken the Light tones.)
3. Duplicate the layer you just enhanced, and rename the original copy of the background layer "Shadows//Highlights". That's so you can tell later what you did to the layer.
4. On the last duplicated layer, (which has the shadows/highlights effects embedded in it), select Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Color Curves. Then choose Increase Contrast from the list of optional settings. For most of my Arizona photos, the dark setting adds too much contrast and I move the botton lever to the right a bit to lighten the darker areas. Adjust the other sliders as you need.
5. Retitle that last layer "Color Curves/SH". That's for history purposes in case you ever want to change this photo again.
6. Save the file as a PSD file, preserving all the layers.
Try that technique on the following images. Both link to larger image files.
The end.
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