DS106 Visual Assignment 340 asked me to emphasize details- remove all color from a photo, and then restore the original color to a single object. Here’s one of my favorite examples from a project I did a few years back along with a printable 1-page directions handout.

My partner is a singer/songwriter who also plays bass and guitar. He’s been a great sport letting me experiment with new digital story telling tools over the last couple of years.  One day while in the recording studio laying down new tracks for his latest CD, he agreed to let me take photos of him in action. The original color image I use in this example is nice enough. It tells a story of a musician hard at work in the studio. But I wanted something that would really grab your attention.  I decided to highlight the bass by leaving it in living color and tone done the rest of the photo by making it black & white.  This was especially powerful when you see his black & white hands holding the colored bass. Talk about a SPLASH.

The trickiest part to accomplishing this effect using Photoshop Elements 11 is the use of the Lasso Tool.  You can pretty easily select the bulk of the object you want to leave in color- or make it a B&W object for another perspective. The hard part to making this look nice is the fine tuning you need to do while using the Lasso Tool.  I had to zoom in very close and use the add more and subtract options alternately to select only what I wanted. You then copy and paste the selection into a new layer.  As long as you don’t move any of the images in the individual layers themselves they will all align properly.