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Photoshop is way cool.

Gday, as I work my way through the airbrushing for my last family shoot, I pause occasionally to learn new things one of these has been to mess around with colour splashing. Its no surprise that this excites me, frankly I find black and white photography very beautiful so to add some striking splash of colour amongst the black and white grain is super appealing.

There are loads of ways that you can do this but I have found layers to be the best way. Generally speaking I select the part I want to retain the colour, feather my selection Ctrl+J for a new layer and then adjust the background to black and white.

Voila you have colour splash.

When I first started messing around with it I found that there are loads of ways to select the areas you want coloured and it kind of depends on the look you are going for as to which one you use.

For example, in the photo below I used >Select>Colour range and messed around with the settings until I got the sort of effect I wanted

Here are a couple more photos with varied feathering and more or less fuzziness applied to select the amount of that #colourrange to adjust as you can see there is a varied number of results:

Another method was to use the #Quickselectiontool from the tools menu which is awesome for simply picking up the section or area you want and going from there. Here are a couple examples of Quick selection tool in action:

I found though with this one you need to get your feather right (Select>Modify>Feather) as depending on the photo it can be just a bit too harsh and not terribly aesthetically pleasing. You can see the first photo is the #coloursplash without feathering (the second is the original photo). It would have looked that much nicer with a feathered edge.

In the below image you can see a feathered edge in action, there is no halo of light around it and whilst its a quick example and my selection isnt perfect you can see the difference between the two methods:

Finally I worked out there are some fun settings under the layers menu that allows you to add a fun little filter onto the layer you created with your selection. This can be used for example for brightening stars in night photography or in the case below you can see I used it to colour splash the models blue eyes and then applied a ‘screen’ filter across the selection leaving her with icy coloured eyes with the slightest hint of blue. Not something you would use for portrait photography but it would be cool if you were getting creative for some kind of project work.

Anyhoo until tomorrow!!

Jaans

Blog originally posted to facebook, tyou can find it here:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/photos-by-jaana-liisa-brown/photoshop-is-way-cool/519009731556985

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