Color, Black & White
A Black & White (or Sepia tone) image with a color main subject.
1. Open chosen image in Photoshop. A photo with a clearly defined subject works great, which is why I chose this purple flower.
2. As always, duplicate the background. You may wish to blend higher layers later and having the original as the bottom layer means you’ll always be able to revert.
3. Use a selection tool of your choice (magnetic lasso worked great here) to select the flower.
4. Copy then paste selection, it should appear as a new layer. This gives us the freedom to manipulate the background or subject independently.
5. Switch to ‘background copy’ then do one of the following:
5.1 Click image>adjustments>desaturate. You should now see a color flower and a black & white background.
5.2 Click image>adjustments>equalize>desaturate. You should now see a color flower and a black & white background with more contrast than in step 5.1
5.3 Click image>adjustments>desaturate>equalize. Notice that by changing the order of equalizing and desaturating, we get a background with even more contrast that in step 5.2.
5.4 Click image>adjustments>Hue&Saturation. Check the ‘colorize’ box. Set hue to 0 and Saturation to 25 to get a Sepia tone background.
6. By now, the flower is really popping in front of the background, grabbing the center of your attention. You could stop here or modify the background a little more.
7. Duplicate the Background Copy and select the new ‘Background Copy 2′ layer.
8. Choose Filter>Noise>Median, set slider to 1 or 2 pixels.
9. Choose ‘Overlay’ from the drop down menu on the ‘Layers’ window.
