Splash the Color - ds106 Visual Assignment

Conservatory Water Lily

Visual Assignment 340: Splash the Color

Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table.


Steps the I used for the Assignment:

• I opened up Photoshop and drug in the photo from the Explorer folder that I wanted to use. 
• You could also open it from the File menu. 
• I duplicated the background photo in the Layers palette and applied a black and white adjustment layer (the half black/half white circle at the bottom of the Layers palette). 
• I then went back to the adjustment layer menu and choose the Curves adjustment.  Within this dialog box I pumped up the blacks by dropping that portion of the histogram (bottom left)  and pulled up the whites (top right) to add punch to the photo. 
• Then I went back to the black and white adjustment layer and started painting with black paint on the layer mask. Anywhere you paint on the mask with black shows the color layer below. If you make a mistake you can switch the paintbrush to white and paint out anything you have painted in incorrectly. You can cover a large area with black paint and fat brush and then go back to the edges for refining the image with a small brush and white paint (always check to make sure you are painting on the mask layer only. You can tell it is the layer mask because when you are on the mask there will be a black box surrounding the mask when it is targeted). 
• You can change your brush size on the fly by using the left (to make the brush smaller) and right  (to make the brush larger) bracket keys when you have the brush tool selected.
• Once you have painted back in all of the colored parts of the photo by using the mask - you should save the file (both as a PSD for future editing and a JPG for posting to the web.

 Conservatory Bromelaid

 

Lots O' Peppers 

Lots O' Peppers 2