Create a Cool Color Splash Effect

There’s A Photographic Effect you may have seen if you’re friends with any parents on Facebook. An image is drained of color, apart from specific hues, which are injected back into the otherwise monochrome image.

It’s a bit overused—and, if we’re being honest, groan-inducing, especially when applied to photos of newborn babies—but by recreating it, we can gain some insights into how Photoshop works, because it’s possible to do it in a couple different ways, depending on whether you choose to work on the colors involved specifically, by selecting them directly, or just the area you want to work on more generally, by selecting the pixels in a certain area, no matter what color they are.

It’s a relatively simple effect, albeit a striking one, so is something you could achieve in image editing apps other than Photoshop. And if you can use it to make a new mom smile, then we’ve all made the world a better place. 

- Ian Evenden

1 Choose a photo

We’re going to work on a photo of typical city scene here, but you could use anything with a strong, isolated color in it, such as a baby with piercing eyes, or a woman with full, red lips. Whatever you choose, open the image in Photoshop and, for the first of our color isolation methods, head to the “Select” menu, and choose “Color Range”.

2 Select Colors 

In the window that opens, you have the choice of being able to select colors in a range—reds, say—or by sampling an area with the eyedropper, which functions more or less identically to the main Eyedropper tool in Photoshop. By sampling the yellow cab with the dropper, it appears white in the small preview. You can expand this to the main image by choosing “Grayscale” from the “Selection Preview” drop-down, which makes for a very odd image, but lets you see exactly what you’re selecting. Once you’re happy with what you’ve sampled, click “OK,” and the familiar marching ants of the Photoshop selection now wall off those pixels. You’ll almost certainly select some additional colors that you don’t want by using this method, so use the Quick Selection tool in conjunction with Shift and Alt to add and remove selected areas.

3 Eyedropper Excellence