What is the effect called when one color stays visible and the rest of the photo is black and white?
Asked 12/29/2012
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My camera has a mode that keeps only one color (such as red, green, blue, or yellow) while converting the rest of the image to black and white. What is this effect called, and can it also be created in Photoshop or similar editing software?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
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This technique is called Selective color.
Sometimes, you select a point (in this case, somewhere on the CD-R case), and the region around that point that is close enough to the same color retains its color, while the rest of the picture becomes black and white.
Other times, as you mention, you can select a color and a tolerance, or a range of colors, and the software will allow anything within that range to remain colored.
On the example on the Wikipedia page, it appears that the saturated region was hand-selected or masked.
Originally by user378. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user378
13y ago
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Yes. The effect is commonly called selective color (often also described as color isolation or partial color).
It can be created in Photoshop and many other editors. There are two common ways:
- Masking/selection: manually select the subject or area you want to keep in color, then convert the rest of the image to black and white.
- HSL/HSV adjustment: reduce the saturation of all other colors to zero while leaving the chosen color range saturated. You can also adjust tolerance or luminance to refine the result.
A camera’s “part color” mode is essentially doing this automatically in-camera by keeping a chosen color range and desaturating everything else.
Masking usually gives the most precise result, especially when the subject and background share similar colors. HSL tools are faster when the color you want to keep is clearly distinct from the rest of the scene.
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