Guide: Selective Colouring

This is a step-by-step guide on how to get different tonal effects in the pictures you take, using Photoshop’s Selective Colour tool. I used this particular tool in the Polaroid shots of Andy. It is good for adding colour to black and white pictures, but is also good to give colourful pictures a slightly different mood.

• Open your image
• Get rid of any imperfections using the clone or spot-healing tool.
• Click Image > Adjustments > Selective Colour
• Where it says “Colours”, click the drop down arrow and you will get a list of different colours. Whichever color you wish to change in your picture can be selected from this drop down selection.

If you have trouble deciding on what look you’re wanting, just try moving the sliders on different colours and experimenting first. It helps writing down what you did though, so you can achieve the same look again without too much trouble.

I chose this picture to demonstrate the different kinds of effects you can achieve.

Original:

Desaturated then set to Whites > Cyan -33 > Neutrals > Cyan +8, Yellow +9 to achieve this:


Kept the colour, but used Selective colour to pick out the blues and cyans, then made the black parts really dark to achieve this:



Again, kept the colour, but increased the Whites to make them more yellow, then added magenta to the neutrals to get this:



Mostly, Selective Colour is trial and error, but the above examples give you an idea of what kind of effects you can achieve with the tool.