Inside Photoshop: Search Articles

Selectively remove color from an image

by Renée Dustman
Applications:
Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3/CS4/CS5
Operating Systems:
Macintosh, Microsoft Windows

I’ve seen some magazine ads where most of the image is black and white but a portion of the image is in color. Is this look difficult to achieve in Photoshop?

On the contrary—it’s quite simple! You can create some really cool effects when you mix color and grayscale pixels together in a single Photoshop image. An example of this is shown in Figure A. There are many ways you can create this sort of effect, but one of the easiest methods we’ve found involves blending.

To selectively remove color from your image:

1. Open an RGB image in Photoshop.
2. Click the Defa...