Photoshop:Taking a b&w image & brushing in color or blurring a background

scottphotography

can someone direct me to a tutorial on this please? Thank you!

pyrtek

There's some good information about this in Katrin Eismann's retouching
book. Basically, for each color you want to paint in, you create a Solid Color
layer in Color blending mode, make its mask black and then paint in white
over areas you want to be that color. It's very simple to do, but very difficult
to do well.

scottphotography

pyrtek wrote:

There's some good information about this in Katrin Eismann's retouching
book. Basically, for each color you want to paint in, you create a Solid Color
layer in Color blending mode, make its mask black and then paint in white
over areas you want to be that color. It's very simple to do, but very difficult
to do well.

thank you,but what I really want is to take a b&w photo that was originally a color, & just keep for example the flowers in their original color.

pyrtek

scottphotography wrote:

thank you,but what I really want is to take a b&w photo that was originally a color, & just keep for example the flowers in their original color.

Oh, you mean selective color. That's easy to do. Create your B&W image
on top of your color image, add a white mask to it and paint in black over
areas you want to be color (ie. the flowers in your example). Or, better yet,
leave the whole image B&W or color.

pathfinder

You can also create your B&W image as a layer over the original color image, and then paint the color back with the History brush. Very easy to do.

You may or may not prefer to do a selection of the area to be painted first, if you have trouble painting within the lines:D

Mr. 2H2O

pathfinder wrote:

You can also create your B&W image as a layer over the original color image, and then paint the color back with the History brush. Very easy to do.

You may or may not prefer to do a selection of the area to be painted first, if you have trouble painting within the lines:D

That is what I do (the first thing) - takes time, but results are beautiful!

- Mike

scottphotography

Photoshop Video tutorials

Mr. 2H2O wrote:

That is what I do (the first thing) - takes time, but results are beautiful!

- Mike

How do i blur background? i.e. remove people in background w/o distrupting the picture?

Mr. 2H2O

scottphotography wrote:

How do i blur background? i.e. remove people in background w/o distrupting the picture?

One way involves creating a duplicate layer and using Gaussian Blur on the duplicate layer with a big ole honkin' radius, then "erasing" the part of that layer which is your main focal point.

For instance, if you take a pic of someone and the aperture was pretty small and you want to "pull" the person forward in the composition, the method above would put a huge blur on the duplicate layer, then when you erase over the person you want to make the main focal point, it will reveal the sharp picture of that person amidst the blur.

- Mike

pathfinder

Yes, basically you have to select the foreground subject, save it as a Selection ( as an alpha channel ) blur the lackground with a copy of the subject selection on a layer above the blurred background to avoid a fuzzy edge to the subject. The blurred background needs to have the background cloned into the area of the subject so that the edge between the sharp subject and the blurred background looks correct and not apparent to the viewer's eye.

I wrote in more detail about it here

In more detail, I take a subject in an image and select it - today I frequently use the Quick Select Tool, although any selection tool can be used if you are patient. I then use the Refine Edge command, in its Quick Mask mode, to see precisely the mask I have selected. I then save this mask as an alpha channel, by Select>Save Selection. I make a second copy of the background layer with ctrl-j. I then reload the selection of the subject by Select>Load Selection. I then use the clone on this upper layer, to to sample around the outside of the selection, and clone it into the area occupied by the subject. This step is important, because it makes the background look like the subject is not there when it is blurred with the Gaussian Blur. After cloning all around the subjects border, ctrl-d removes the selection's marching ants, and then the Gaussian Blur can be done at an appropriate radius, somewhere between 4 and 20 or so.

Now click on the original, lower layer in your layer palette ( click on the eyeball in the layers palette so you see only the lower layer ), and then reload the alpha channel to see your subject selected. CTRL-J will duplicate this selected subject and make a new layer in your layer palette on top of your two other layers. Now you should see a sharply outlined subject with an appropriately blurred background with a margin that looks believable.

This goes pretty quickly once you have done it a few times, if you know how to get the selection you want easily. Learning to do good selections can take a little time if the subject does not have sharp, simple borders, like hair blowing in the wind can be very tedious. Once you have the selection, you just have to blur a leyer beneath a copy of your selection on top. The trick is the the blurred background needs to have the subject cloned out first to look correct without a blurry, fuzzy after image of the subject remaining.

I used this technique to blur the background of this image from England. The image on the right shows the mask used for the selection, and how sharp the background was.


[imgl]http://pathfinder.smugmug.com/photos/303201326_piToy-XL.jpg[/imgl][imgr]http://pathfinder.smugmug.com/photos/304933013_UAtvx-XL.jpg[/imgr]

















































And this image shot with a 40D at f16, as well.