Web Design Tutorials Made Easy

This is another method to produce the same effect as these two earlier tutorials. This is my preferred method as it leaves the image untouched, you don’t have to duplicate the image layer, and you can very easily edit which part of the image is ‘highlighted’ later on, if you change your mind.

Let’s get started.

Step 1:

Open the image you wish to isolate an area of. Then, in the layer palette, click the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” button (shown in the image), and click “Hue/Saturation…”. Alternatively, click Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation… on the menus:

Step 2:

Drag the Saturation slider down to the bottom, -100. The whole image should appear desaturated. Click OK.

A new layer should appear above the image layer, called “Hue/Saturation 1″. You will notice that this layer has two icons. The first: means it’s an adjustment layer. You can double click this to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog box once again to edit the settings of the layer. The second: is the layer mask. Anything white on this mask lets the adjustment layer do it’s work on the layers below. Anything black on this mask stops the adjustment layer from working.

Step 3:

So here’s how we do the actual highlighting. Notice, the whole image is desaturated, and the whole of the layer mask is white. Click on the layer mask on the Hue/Saturation layer ( this image) and select a black brush. Zoom in nice and tight to the area you wish to bring back to colour, and start painting with black! Make sure that the layer mask is selected, otherwise it will not work. Anything you paint black you should see that the colour comes through once again:

If you make a mistake - don’t worry! Just paint anything you wish to become desaturated again with white, instead of black, and it will return to the way it was. And that is it. Just delete the Hue/Saturation layer anytime you want your original image back!

If you decide that you wish everything to be a different colour, rather than black and white, you can of course just double click that Adjustment icon (), slide the Saturation back to 0 and change Hue, for example:

Have fun