How do I do this?

[Hughesmar]

I don't know exactly what the effect is called, but it's when you take one specific part or object in the picture and really brighten it up, while the rest of the pic is black and white.

I've got this really nice picture of my daughter where I think this aforementioned effect would look really cool on her hair, but have no idea how to go about doing it.

Any tips?

[ItsNoot]

You have to mask the image so only the desired area is affected by the changes you want to make. Personally, for quick and dirty masks I like to use the lasso tool in photoshop.

[DUKE HARDKNOCK]

If you've already got a picture you can easily edit it according to your wishes in Photoshop, if you happen to have access to that. The quickest way to do it would be to apply a mask I believe, but since I've never really bothered to learn how to use those things I'll describe how you can do in one of two dumb old-fashioned ways.

1. First, start by desaturating your picture. Unfortunately I haven't got an English version of Photoshop here, but there should be a tab to the right of the 'Edit' tab that probably says 'Picture' or something and which has a bunch of stuff about size etc. One of the submenus deals with the picture's colours and you can choose to desaturate it there.

This turns everything into greyscale, without reducing your image to a single layer, 8-bit picture. You can still do all the fancy Photoshopping stuff.

Now you'll have to do some slightly tedious manual labour. What you do is choose the history brush (if all's well it should be directly below the regular brush icon). When you hold the mouse button and drag the history brush around the picture, it'll undo the desaturisation where you're 'drawing'. By doing this, you can easily restore all colour to your daughter.

2. A different, more accurate method is to create a selection around your daughter and only desaturate the background. There are two ways to do this that don't involve masks.

The first is by using the lasso tool. If you right-click on the little lasso icon, you should get a choice between three different versions of the tool. Choose the angular one. Zoom in on the picture and start clicking along your daughter's outine to draw a precise selection. If you fuck up, press delete or backspace to remove the last selection point. You can finish your selection by double-clicking.

The alternative is to use the pen tool (the icon looks like an antique ink pen, unless things have changed in more recent versions of Photoshop). This tool lets you draw vectors, so you can have really curved selections. It works much like the point-to-point lasso tool, except every time you click you have to hold the mouse button and drag the mouse around to change the curve (you can also mess with each of the control points later on, though). When you're done, right-click on it and turn your vector shape into an actual selection. Finally, go to the layer window, right-click on the vector layer (it should be active) and rasterise the layer. Now you've got a normal selection.

When you're done making the selection, you can edit your selection at the Selection tab if you like (try messing with the 'feather' setting to avoid a very harsh divide between colour and black-and-white). After that, desaturate as described above.

3. Finally, in the same submenu where you find the desaturate function, you can do tons of stuff with the colours. Try moving the 'levels' sliders around, for example, to brighten/darken everything.

4. Tip: when you've selected your daughter, cut and paste her into a new layer before you desaturate the picture. That way you can easily edit her independently of the background and perhaps add a bit of a glow or something (double-click her layer to get a range of options on doing that sort of stuff) if you like.

[Gibb]

Some cameras, such as Slacker's has this ability built in as one of the extras.

To do it using an editing tool, just mask the part you want to keep colored and greyscale the rest of the image. (by inverting the mask)

[ItsNoot]

2. A different, more accurate method is to create a selection around your daughter and only desaturate the background. There are two ways to do this that don't involve masks.

The first is by using the lasso tool. If you right-click on the little lasso icon, you should get a choice between three different versions of the tool. Choose the angular one. Zoom in on the picture and start clicking along your daughter's outine to draw a precise selection. If you fuck up, press delete or backspace to remove the last selection point. You can finish your selection by double-clicking.

:stupid: My favorite way.

Another tip for using this method: If you get a few extra pixels in the background that still have color you can use the sponge tool like a color eraser later. IOW, your resultant lasso doesnt have to be perfect.

[Hughesmar]

Some cameras, such as Slacker's has this ability built in as one of the extras.

To do it using an editing tool, just mask the part you want to keep colored and greyscale the rest of the image. (by inverting the mask)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my camera actually has this ability too (SD600); I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

That being said, it's a shame I don't have Photoshop. I'm assuming I could probably do this in GIMP?

Also, the aforementioned picture for reference:
http://lh4.google.com/image/markjhughesjr/RlOvwY73cYI/AAAAAAAAANY/a6E6trOQHF0/s800/IMG_0106.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.com/markjhughesjr/Kids/photo?authkey=H70lm-daHkc#5067587251584070018)

[ItsNoot]

Nice shot :) It actually looks like a pretty easy mask to be honest. Man I bet the magic wand would even work for all that loose hair. Sadly I dont have the time to devote atm, but I'm betting a couple other slackers around here will have a go at it.

Stupid work :mad:

[Gibb]

Well I think all of the features we've mentioned in this thread are not photoshop exclusive. They all exist in Paint Shop Pro XI, which I use at work. It's $100 if you buy it in a store, but you can likely get it for cheaper online. I really like it, and it's infinitely easier to use than photoshop or the GIMP.

[DUKE HARDKNOCK]

Ok here's two slightly sloppy versions (second one has a light halo) so you get an idea of how it would look. I don't have time for anything really sophisticated right now, but I think they're all right for shrinking down to the size of a regular photo.

[Gibb]

Cute kid, Hughesmar.

I whipped up a really crappy example just to see if this is what you were talking about. I obviously didn't spend much time making the mask on her hair.

[Hughesmar]

Yeah Gibb, that's what I was talking about. Although, Butts' versions were pretty dang nice too.

[Gibb]

I think Butt's version with a blur effect on the background would look really nice.

[DUKE HARDKNOCK]

Oh fuck I hadn't noticed you were specifically referring to her hair. I guess I could do that too, but in order to get the desired effect you'd pretty much have to undo the desaturation on all strands of hair and that means working pixel by pixel which is a huge pain in the ass - especially at a relatively low resolution like this, where the colours blend into each other. It'd be much easier with a high res version of the picture, although even then it requires a great deal of precision work.

[Hughesmar]

Actually, if you click the original picture I linked, you can download a 2816×2112 version of the pic. :D

Not that I'm asking you to go ahead and go thru that painstaking process just so I don't have to. :O

[ItsNoot]

Butts do you have his daughter in a seperate layer? If so do you mind sharing all that leg work?

[mellotron]

Now if you wanted to highlight only a certain range of colours an easy way to do a selection is (in GIMP iirc) to select by colour, or in Photoshop Select -> Colour Range, inverting that selection then desaturate the rest. That will ive you the effect similar to that found on Canon cameras, but since your daughter's hair is close to the same tone as her face it wouldn't work so well. The best way is to use Butt's method and to manually create a selection around the entire subject (your daughter) using a tool similar to the polygon lasso. For Photoshop aficionados I recommend using the pen tool as it allows you to use curves instead of straight lines. Gibb has a good idea of blurring the background as that will bring focus of your daughter. Gaussian Blur will work well, but if GIMP has it, a photo-blur or lens-blur will create a more realistic effect by allowing you to clip highlights as well as adjust the bokeh of the blur.