Maximum_PC_June_2017

R&D
Create a Cool Color
Splash Effect
You’ll nEEd thIs
photoshop
Available from www.adobe.com.
a suItable photo
Choose an image with a
strong, isolated color in it.
There’s a phoTographic effecT you may have seen if you’re friends with any parents on
Facebook. An image is drained of color, apart from specific hues, which are injected back into the
otherwise monochrome image.
It’s a bit overused—and, if we’re being honest, groan-inducing, especially when applied to photos
of newborn babies—but by recreating it, we can gain some insights into how Photoshop works,
because it’s possible to do it in a couple different ways, depending on whether you choose to work
on the colors involved specifically, by selecting them directly, or just the area you want to work on
more generally, by selecting the pixels in a certain area, no matter what color they are.
It’s a relatively simple effect, albeit a striking one, so is something you could achieve in imageediting
apps other than Photoshop. And if you can use it to make a new mom smile, then we’ve all
made the world a better place. –Ian EvEndEn
1
Choose a photo
We’re going to work on a photo of typical city scene here, but you
could use anything with a strong, isolated color in it, such as a
baby with piercing eyes, or a woman with full, red lips. Whatever
you choose, open the image in Photoshop and, for the first of our
color isolation methods, head to the “Select” menu, and choose
“Color Range” [Image a].
2
seleCt Colors
In the window that opens, you have the choice of being able
to select colors in a range—reds, say—or by sampling an
area with the eyedropper, which functions more or less identically
to the main Eyedropper tool in Photoshop. By sampling the yellow
cab with the dropper, it appears white in the small preview. You can
expand this to the main image by choosing “Grayscale” from the
“Selection Preview” drop-down, which makes for a very odd image,
but lets you see exactly what you’re selecting. Once you’re happy
with what you’ve sampled, click “OK,” and the familiar marching
ants of the Photoshop selection now wall off those pixels. You’ll
almost certainly select some additional colors that you don’t want
by using this method, so use the Quick Selection tool in conjunction
with Shift and Alt to add and remove selected areas.
3
eyedropper exCellenCe
An interlude: Speaking of color selection and eyedroppers,
here’s something that blew our collective mind when we
A
found out about it. The Eyedropper tool isn’t confined to
Photoshop. It works across your whole monitor, so if you
want to sample a color from a web page, you can, just
by having the page open, and dragging the tool across
from Photoshop. Your color selection must start within
Photoshop, but once you’re sampling, you can drag the
dropper anywhere on your screen, release, and have the
color information sampled to Photoshop. Neat, huh?
4
deColorIze the baCkground
Back to business. Now you want to remove the color
from the rest of the image, so invert your selection
(“Select > Inverse”), and head to the Layers palette. At
the bottom, there’s an icon that looks like a circle divided
in half. Part black, part white. Click it, and a menu pops
up with all the different Adjustment Layers you can add.
Choose “Black White,” and you should instantly get your
desired effect. There are still plenty of options to mess
around with, though, including some presets (we’ve used
High Contrast Blue [Image b]) and sliders to manually
adjust the effect. If the color that remains isn’t as bright as
you’d like, bring back the selection (“Select > Reselect,”
then “Select > Inverse”), before using the Hue/Saturation
Window (“Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation”) to
bring out the color more strongly.
B
62 MAXIMUMPC Jun 2017 maximumpc.com