blogstruk.comblogging tips, amateur blogs, what is a blog

How to Use Color Isolation in Blog Headers

Posted by How To Blog

I’ve recently been playing around with creating quick but aesthetically pleasing header graphics for some of my blogs.  I’ve hired illustrators to design header graphics for some of my blogs and have been quite pleased with the results overall.  However it can be expensive and isn’t something I recommend for amateur blogs or people new to the blogging arena.

Therefore I’m going to show you how to use Photoshop CS 5.0 to perform something called color isolation.

Color isolation is quite simply, the process of taking a color photograph and “isolating” just one of its colors.  Here’s an example of color separation:

Here’s the original photo:

And here’s the photo after the color isolation process:

As you can see, everything in the photo is in black and white except for the red top that the girl is wearing.

So, how do you do that?  Well, I’m going to tell you:

1.  Open Photoshop CS 5.0.  Select the background layer.

2.  Right click on the layer and select “Duplicate Layer” to make a copy of that layer.  Name the duplicate layer or leave the default layer name.

3.  Click on the duplicate layer and from the pull-down menu at the top select Image, Magic Extractor.

4.  Make sure the Foreground Brush Tool is selected:

5.  Click multiple times on the item that should keep its color.   Red dots should appear wherever you click.  You don’t need to cover the entire area, just be sure to cover some of the interior and the edges.

6.  Select the Background Brush Tool:

7.  Click multiple times on the areas that will be converted to black and white.  Again, you don’t have to cover the entire area but be sure to click the areas that border the “red dot” area:

8.  Click OK when done.  The red area should not have a bounding box around it:

9.  Select the background layer.

10.  From the pull-down menu at the top select Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation.

11.  Make sure the Preview option is selected.  Move the saturation slider to the left.  Notice that the color is removed from all areas of the photo except the red area.   Once you’ve modified the saturation level to your liking click the OK button.

12.  Voila!  You’re done!