Colour Accents - Technique #1
As I alluded to in this post, here is the first of the photography technique posts that I will be trying to compile.
As I said, when I am trying to master a new technique, most of the time I find that I am trawling various websites and blogs, each of which helps a little and leads me to play with each technique, developing it and tweaking it until it works the way I want it to. I am welcome to hear of any dedicated, easy to follow sites on photography techniques. In the mean time, I will post with my own guidelines.
I want to start with colour accents as these are really quick and easy and can make an instant impact. Colour accents are handy when you want to highlight areas of busy photographs that you don’t want to crop.
I’ll use a photograph which I took at the protest on school cuts which marched through Dublin this morning. I’ll also use Adobe Photoshop for my explanations but the same principle can be applied in most other photo editing software. Heres the original photo.
The first step is to duplicate the background layer. Do this by right clicking on the image in the layer toolbar and selecting “duplicate layer”.
Ensuring that the new layer is selected, desaturate the colours by selecting Image > Adjustments > Desaturate
Again, ensuring that the top, duplicate layer is selected, choose the eraser tool from the palate and begin punching holes in the topmost layer so that the colours from beneath show through.
You can tidy up the edges of the erased area by changing the brush size.
And remember, if you go too far or get too carried away with the eraser, use the history toolbar to jump back a few steps.
Amend each layer as required - I tend to increase the contrast of the top (desaturated) layer and increase the saturation of the bottom (background) layer.
The end product should look something like this.
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- Dec 22, 2008: The Apple of my Eye | Pana-Vision
- Mar 21, 2009: The Almond Croissant Diaries » Blog Archive » RAW images
No Responses to “Colour Accents - Technique #1”
By Donal on Dec 23, 2008 | Reply
Hey, thanks for the tip. Saved this in my Google Reader a while back and finally got the opportunity to try it. Unfortunately, the eraser didn’t work on Gimp, it just turned it into a white background. Couldn’t figure out what to do so came across this tutorial http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Selective_Color/ for Gimp which did the job. Check it out on my Cork photoblog: http://www.pana-vision.org/2008/12/22/the-apple-of-my-eye/