Color Magic with Photoshop Elements

Happy Wednesday!!  Sorry my posts have been really sporatic - life is hectic and when something has to give, blogging is it....

So then, back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Today's whatever is one of my favorite Photoshop Elements tricks - colorizing part of a black and white picture.  To be fair, this is a bit of a cheat since the beginning picture is colorized.  But you say potato, I say patahto.  And the results looks so professional that I have to regularly sign that they are indeed my photos and not a professional photographers (when picking up the pictures from printing).  This is a bit of an abbreviated how-to because I'm making the assumption that you already know the basics of Photoshop Elements.  If anyone has any questions about the process, I'd be happy to help.  Ok, on to the tute...

I took a ton of pictures on my sister's wedding day.  One of my favorites is this one of us girls before heading to the church:

Our bridesmaid dresses were each a different color (rainbow wedding) and I wanted them to really pop.  I started out with a regular full color picture and opened in for editing in Photoshop Elements and created a duplicate layer:

Then I converted the top layer into black and white and hid the top layer to switch back to the full color layer

I selected my Magic Wand Tool on the left toolbar and started selecting the dress colors

After I had a bit selected, I would unhide the top black and white layer and simply delete the area in the Magic Wand

Wash, rinse and repeat until all of the desired area has been deleted from the black and white picture, then simply save the image as a JPEG

It took a few hours to get all of the dress parts selected in the colorized layer and then deleted in the black and white layer, but the result was well worth the effort!  I've done this technique with every possible type of picture, from pictures of Munchkin to pictures of wildlife - and everytime I absolutely love the end print!