Basic Photoshop Tutorial

Hello all

I've just been dabbling with Photoshop recently and created a basic effect for which I wrote a tutorial. This is really, really easy so if you're at all familiar with Photoshop, it's probably advisable to read no further. If you're just getting started, though, you might find it interesting or helpful, so here goes:

This is a very basic tutorial on how to produce an image that mixes colour and black and white photography, to give a rather striking effect.

OK... let's kick off. Imagine that I have taken a photograph on my digital camera and successfully transferred it on to my PC. I then launch Photoshop, and click on File and then Open, and select the relevant image. In this case, I'm working with this shot:

With the image open, I clicked on Ctrl-A to select all. This puts a mask (dotted line) around the whole area. I then pressed Ctrl-C (to copy) and went to File, and then New. It brings up the image properties with the dimensions of the area I have just copied, and I change the characters of the new file from RGB to Grayscale.

This produces a copy of the image in black and white:

On this new image, I clicked on Ctrl-A to select all once more, and then pressed Ctrl-C (to copy). I can now close this black and white image (I do not need to save it). Underneath this window is my original color image. By pressing Ctrl-V, I paste a copy of the black and white image over the color one, as a separate layer. I want the black and white image to be the bottom layer, so I go to the layers palette and drag the layer beneath.

OK, so I now I have the color image sitting on top of the white one. I now zoom in on the starfish (on the color layer) and try to select the area that makes up the starfish. In my case, I primarily used the magic mask tool and the elliptical tool (to get the rounded edges of the starfish). Each time I selected an area, I hold down the shift key so that my new selection includes the selection already made. If I find that I select too much, I just undo the last action or go back in the history. Once I have the whole starfish selected, I inversed the selection and hit the delete key. This deletes all of the colour layer, except for the starfish.

There are possibly easier ways to do this but I just found it was a method that worked for me. You could equally use an eraser tool and gradually delete all the detail around the starfish, gradually exposing the black and white image beneath.

And the final result...? Here it is:

Might not be everyone's 'cup of tea' but at least shows an effect that's relatively simple to do with Photoshop. The same technique can be applied to a variety of scenarios. For example, if you have a picture of a product, but wish to remove the background that it sits on.

All this work was done with high res. originals of the images, so any imperfections in the work are pretty much unnoticeable at these smaller sizes.

Hope this is helpful/interesting to at least some of you.

Aaron
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