Color Popping - Memory Monday #3

By Vicky Nardone

For this week's page I have a small tutorial. When I was in college for Digital Media Arts we learned about the history brush in photo shop.  The history brush allows you to take a copy of an image, do whatever you want to it, and then paint back to the copy.  One of my favorite techniques to do with the history brush is to make a photo black and white and then paint back some of the color as I did with the above page.

This usually works best if there is a dominant color in a photo or series of photos that really pops and you want to draw attention to it.  In the above photos I used my dress which was a really pretty shade of turquoise blue.

Now for the tutorial, I am using photoshop and the tutorial will be specific to the setup of photoshop.  However, you may be able to create the same effect in photoshop elements or an open source photoshop program like GIMP.

The first step is to open the photo you want to use in photo shop.  I'm going with this photo from my wedding.  I plan to make the photo black and white and then paint back the yellow sunflowers.

Once you have your photo open, take the color out of it by going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate in the top menu.

Select the history brush tool from the tool menu on the left.  It looks like a paint brush with a semi-circle around it.  Also make sure that you have the top layer selected in the history menu.  If the history menu is not open, go to Window > History in the top bar.  Click the box next to the top item in the History menu if there is no brush in it to make sure that it is the layer you will be painting from.

The last step is just to use the history brush to paint over the spots of the photograph you want to add the color back to.  Here's how my finished product came out.

When I use this technique in scrapbooking, I usually pick a color in the photograph to hi-light and then use that to set my color scheme for my page.

Hope you enjoyed learning something new today!  For all you photoshop gurus out there - any other fun techniques that you use to edit the photos you use for scrapbooking?

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