Desaturation

In earlier posts I have said that because I already have a lot of black and white portraits under my belt, I wanted coloured prints. Split toning is a good way to add colour to a black and white image, as I have shown using the picture of Lucy. Another way of adding slight colour is to keep the photograph colour, but move the "Saturation" slider down in Photoshop. Not all the way down as this would make it black and white, but slightly down so the colours are rather muted. This is an example taken from The Photo Forum. Someone wanted to know what a specific camera could do, and the girl who took this explained that only a bit of slight desaturation and a cool white balance was used. I want to try this in a few of my pictures to see what effect it gives.