How To: Make Your Photos Pop with Selective Desaturation

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

After carefully brushing away at my car, I came away with this.

You’ll notice slight errors on some of the corners of the car. This can be easily corrected by switching back to a black brush ‘D’, zooming way in, and correcting the mistakes.

You can zoom nearly infinitely with Photoshop, so don’t be afraid to realllllly get in there to correct your colors.

It's much easier to notice even the tiniest errors when you're magnified by 9 times.

After a couple of minutes of touching up, this is what I came away with.

Remember, when using layer masks to achieve this effect, alternating between black and white brushes and exercising patience is key.

2. The Pen Tool

The Pen Tool can be a little daunting for people upon initial use, but learning to master it can truly open a lot of creative doors for future projects. The pen tool allows you to accurately trace nearly anything. The importance of a thorough trace? Well, if you’ve got a situation like this one, a proper trace will ensure you ‘color inside the lines’ so-to-speak.

The pen tool works a lot like a connect-the-dot puzzle. Put your cursor where you’d like to begin and click once. A small square will appear. Your next click will connect that initial square to another square, and so on. You’ll notice, however, that the line between each of the squares is straight, which in turn makes it quite hard to trace a car (or any object) with curves.

In order to get the hang of using the pen tool, open this image. (Note: If you’ve already had experience using the pen tool, skip ahead a couple of paragraphs, as this will simply cover the basic concepts.) We’re going to try and make an accurate outline of this pen. In order to do, let’s start around the middle, just underneath the cap. Select the pen tool and make your first selection. Since you’re connecting your points in a straight line, scroll along the length of the pen and connect your first two points by simply clicking once. Continue towards the end of the pen.

Uh oh. Now we have a problem. The tip of the pen is curved, and the pen tool only seems to connect in straight lines. We’re going to have to curve the line. How is this done? First, draw and connect two points from the one side to the other, as shown below.

Every line drawn by the pen tool can be curved or warped in any way you see fit. In this particular instance, left click the center of the line you’ve just drawn to create a new point in the middle of the line. Now hold CTRL to access your pens warping tool. This should change your icon from a pen icon to a mouse icon. Grab that middle point, and pull it outwards so it properly warps to fit the curved end of the pen. You’ve just curved your first line!

Just to make sure you’re getting it, let’s finish the trace.

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The Biking Viking

July 29, 2010 at 4:46pm

Before computers got this capable I used to do this to B&W photos using some vinegar with food coloring painted on with a watercolor brush.

digitalfl00d

April 26, 2010 at 11:39am

Just an FYI: Looks like the RSS feed for this article is future dated... you're going to want to adjust it to the correct April post time because it screws up RSS feed readers.

FunkyGroovy

April 12, 2010 at 2:12pm

Would this work with GIMP too?

bubbaxr7

April 16, 2010 at 4:07pm

Just tried it in GIMP, It does work. You have to right click on the layer that you are using as the mask and select add mask.

gregoryg

April 09, 2010 at 8:24am

This article is bad and you should feel bad. Can anyone say "tacky"? I thought this was pretty cool when I was 14 and screwing around with Photoshop for the first time, but now? Wow.

Bad Maxx

June 14, 2010 at 12:50pm

If I had the power to do so you would be! Your first post? It is a shame you showed your immaturity, the rest of the world really has no idea who you are. Now you created an account and to what?? Show off your failure to play well with others... Yeah that is showing 'em! If anyone should feel bad it is you, but of course you're not mature enough to realize it. Obviously you are above and beyond most people's skill level, why you bothered to read this is beyond comprehension.

@Alan, THANK YOU! I'll be completely honest here and state I have purchased two tutorials for GIMP, and one for PS. Neither of them was basic enough for me, I've zero experience with either of these extremely powerful software programs except to crop or clone and print pictures afterward, this little tutorial was just plain AWESOME! For people like me who have a lot of different Do-It-Yourself skills but have been overwhelmed by the PS and GIMP programs this is one of the best explanations yet, it now has opened the world of Layers and Masks to the point I'm (obviously) excited to try more!

AGAIN THANK YOU TO THE AUTHOR!

the_Troll

April 09, 2010 at 8:28pm

Hope you never have sex. I'm sure you would critic that to.

nedwards

April 09, 2010 at 11:18am

You registered an account just to make this comment? Not everyone is a mystical photoshop wizard, bucko; I found it quite useful. If you already know how to do something we do a how-to for, awesome. You're clearly not the target audience in that case. The How-To is for the people who don't already know how to do it. That's sort of what we do here.

johnny3144

April 09, 2010 at 10:24am

this article may be old news to you, but it's pretty cool to people who aren't knowledgable about photoshop(like me). i find the article to be intersting and helpful. i made one with a picture of a flower in the garden, looks very nice.

Bad Maxx

June 14, 2010 at 12:54pm

Got to admit I am in the same boat and couldn't agree with you more even if I had said it myself! LOL I too made a picture of a plant, my bonsai tree, it looks awesome.