Playing with color

[eimarra]

So a few days ago, I ran across a link to Kuriositas — specifically, a post on selective color photography. I’m completely blanking on the artist who I’ve seen these by (Mom? A little help?), but I’ve always thought the results striking.

I decided to experiment.

I do all my photo manipulation on-line, using Pixlr’s photo editor. The process is simple: open your photo, duplicate it, desaturate the duplicate, then erase the parts of the duplicate where you want the color to show through. (Okay, that’s the tough part, since you have to watch your edges.)

And the results of my first experiment:

Boats at Emerald Lake.

I probably won’t play with it much more any time soon, since Pixlr is Flash based, and Flash causes issues with this computer, but it’s nice to know that the theory is so simple for such a striking result. (Also, yes, I know I didn’t get all the edges done — see previous comment about Flash.)

Originally published at Erin M. Hartshorn. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[temporus.livejournal.com]

There's a setting on my camera that does that. I can pick a color, and that color comes through, the rest is all just a greyscale/B&W photo. If you pick the right color, it can look stunning. I've got one of my niece and son with blue selected, they both have blue in their shirts, and you can see the blue of his eyes lit up. I'm tempted one of these days to do it again so that the only thing in color is his eyes.

[eimarra]

That's cool, Ed. It's possible our camera has such a setting, too. I haven't played with it as much as I could have.

One of the things about doing it manually is I can elect to only do some of the things (for example, not the boats on the dock) and I can get more than one color (the wooden bars across the middles of the boats), so it's a bit more flexible. But being able to do it without additional manipulation would be nice.

[saetter.livejournal.com]

Very nice job! Nice subtle but effect use of color.

[eimarra]

Thanks! One of the hardest things here was choosing which picture to try! ;-)