Photoshop Tutorial: How to Make a Partial Black and White Effect

Photoshop is a great tool for doing special effects with your photographs. In this tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to create the effect of a partially black and white picture (see picture: 1). There are many ways to create this effect and I am going to show you a very simple way to do it. Once you have mastered this technique you can move on to other effects such as colorizing a completely black and white picture. But for this tutorial we will create the effect by removing the color and leaving it just where we want it.

The first step you are going to do is open a photo into your Photoshop program. Go to File, Open and browse for the picture you want. Once you find the file, click Okay to load the picture into Photoshop. Next you need to make a copy of the layer. Go to Layer and select Duplicate Layer (see picture: 2). Make sure that your layer palette is open. To open it, go to Window (at the top) and click the Layer tab. On your Layer palette click the "eye" icon to make the new layer invisible. Then click on the background layer which is what we will be working on next (see picture: 3).

To create the black and white effect in Photoshop, you are going to desaturate the layer. To do this, go to Images, Adjustments, and Desaturate. This will remove all color from this layer making the picture look black and white. Next you are going to click on the "eye" icon on the top layer to make it visible again and click on that layer to work on it next. Once you make the top layer visible again, it should look like a colored photo once more. Now we are going to start removing the color we do not want. Select the eraser tool on the left tool bar. Zoom into the picture a bit and you are going to begin erasing everything on the photo that you do not want colored (see picture: 4). When you get close to the edges of the parts you want to keep, you may need to zoom in a bit so you can get nice and close along the edges. If you accidentally erase too much, just go to Edit and Undo, or open your history palette and go back a step.

I often find that once I have erased the parts that I did not want colored, the rest of the picture looks a bit too saturated, or too strong in color. So to compensate for this I will reduce the color down a bit. To do this, go to Images, Adjustments, and then click on Hue/Saturation. Slide the saturation bar down a bit until the picture looks just right (see picture: 5).

Once everything looks great, you will want to flatten your image. Go to layer and the click Flatten Image and then save your picture. You now have a beautiful picture with a partial black and white effect!