How To: Make Your Photos Pop with Selective Desaturation

Posted 04/09/2010 at 5:13am | by Alan Fackler

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As part of our ongoing efforts to showcase some of the fun effects you can apply with photoshop, we're going to touch on how to selectively desaturate an image.  There are multiple ways to achieve this type of effect; each method involving the utilization of Photoshops massive tool box to do the work for you.  We’re going to go over a couple of different ways to selectively desaturate, but first, what does that even mean? 

‘Saturation’ is a term used to describe the intensity of basic colors that make up an image.  As such, the lower the saturation of the image, the less intense the colors.  When an image has no saturation at all (see: desaturated) , it becomes a black and white image.  ‘Selective saturation’ usually involves converting an image into black and white, with the exception of a single part of a photo that remains in color.  Often, the part of the photo left in color is the primary subject.

Thousands of photographers have used this technique, with varying degrees of success, for a long time. We won’t claim that our example here is going to be high art, but it should serve as a nice guide. 

As in our previous tutorial , we will be achieving this effect by shooting our subject in natural light.  Unlike our previous tutorial, however, this affect can be achieved by shooting in a controlled light environment, so if you’ve got some off camera strobes you’ve been itching to fire, feel free to bust them out!

For this tutorial, we will be shooting a sleek Lotus Elise, parked right outside our offices.  Because the majority of this tutorial has to do with Photoshop, we won’t spend too much time going over your camera settings.  The car I’m going to be shooting is bright orange, a perfect color for this type of project.  When shooting, however, keep in mind that you want your subject to be much more bold than usual.  As such, I recommend taking a good light reading, then knocking your shutter down one or two steps to really get that color to pop.  Doesn’t have to be too dramatic; remember, you’ll have a chance to tinker with your light settings later in Photoshop. 

Once you’ve got an image that you feel will work, upload it to your computer and open up Photoshop.

The quickest and easiest way to go about doing this involves creating a copy of your current layer.  Click over your image in the Layers Palette on the bottom right hand corner of the screen.  Right click the picture, and select Duplicate Layer. 

 This will create two identical images, one on top of the other.  You may already see where I’m going with this.  Select the top layer in your layers palette, go to Image, and hit Desaturate.  You now have a black and white picture laid directly over a colored picture.

This essentially means that if you were to grab your eraser tool, you could erase away the black and white image leaving the colored image below.  Though this may sound easy in concept, it’s extremely easy to botch such a method, mainly because if you accidentally erase outside of the car, the color will spill over. 

In order to counteract this and keep your image looking as professional as possible, I will be covering two easy ways to selectively desaturate any focal point in an image.  Both of these methods can produce a professional looking photo, and can both be done quickly and efficiently with some practice.  

1.  Layer Masking 

Understanding the uses of layer masking can be an integral part in understanding the basic concepts of PS.  In this case, we have a desaturated ‘layer’ covering over the original saturated image.  By using a layer mask, we can choose which parts of the mask we would like to change, and which parts we would like to remain the same.  

In the instance of this tutorial, we want to keep a black and white, desaturated background, but we’d like to bring the colored car in from the picture beneath.  To do this, select your Layer Mask tool on the bottom right hand corner of the screen.   This will create a mask over your top layer that will appear as a white box. 

Make sure to select the white box¸ as you will be drawing on this mask to achieve your desired effect.  

Once you’ve selected the white box, select the brush tool (B), set its opacity and flow to 100%, and choose a nice, large, solid brush.  Begin painting over your car.  You’ll notice that your brush isn’t simply swiping black strokes across your canvas; this brush is bringing the color back into the car!  Keep in mind, however, that painting outside of the car will cause the color to bleed out; a common issue that can ruin the effect.  For the time being, however, don’t worry about the spillage.  Grab a huge brush and just paint around the general area of the car so that the whole vehicle is properly colored.  One of the benefits of a layer mask is that we can go back and touch it up afterwards.  

After taking a huge brush to the photo and painting on the layer mask, I came away with something like this.

You’ll notice that the car is fully colored, but so are segments of the surrounding background.  Layer masking offers a simple solution to this problem.  Reselect your brush tool.  Hit ‘X’ on your keyboard to alternate your back/fore ground colors, and switch to a white brush.  When layer masking, a black brush unveils the image below, but a white brush fights to keep the image black and white.  Zoom in on your image, and lower the size of your brush.  With your new white brush, carefully paint away the color that has bled over.  If a particular segment is giving you trouble, zoom in even closer and/or choose a smaller brush.  Also keep in mind that alternating between a white and black brush while layer masking is key to selective desaturation with layer masks.