how to: selective colour

The charasteric English red phone booths. I know, they're so cliché. Especially with a selective colour treatment. But you just simply can't spend two weeks in London and not take at least one picture of one or more red phone booths.

I've only learnt how to do selective colour effects a few weeks ago, but I just love it. I found this video tutorial extremely useful, especially as a PSE8 user, which means there's no layer mask option yet. But although I've been busy practicing this technique before my holiday, after two weeks, I had quite forgotten how to this. I just needed a quick reminder, and just didn't have the patience to watch the whole video again. So I've made a little tutorial here, summing up the steps to achieve the effect.

Open up a picture, then:

     1.        Duplicate background layer.
     2.        Turn the image into a black & white image, for example by selecting one of the Photoshop preset
                and adjust some of the levels until you're happy with the black & white effect.
    3.         (Pre PSE9 and Photoshop Full Version) Create a level adjustments layer underneath the
                background copy layer.
    4.         Clip the background layer onto the levels adjustments layer by pressing ALT and clicking on the
                line between the two layers. This allows you to use the mask of the levels adjustments layers for
                your background copy.
    5.         Click on the Select a soft brush, choose black as foreground colour, and brush over the area
                where you want to bring back the colour (here the two telephone booths). Switch to white as
                foreground colour and brush carefully ove those areas where you revealed too much of the
                colour underneath to turn them into black & white again.
    6. - 8.  Add adjustment layers, such as levels, contrast and saturation adjustments, if required.
    9.        Add a photo filter if required (I used a Photoshop warmfilter (85) at 22 % here).
   10.       Add your watermark if required.

I hope you might find this useful, just as a little reminder.