Bringing out a single color with Photoshop

Welcome to another quick photohop tutorial, if you’ve been following me the past couple of weeks you’ve noticed that we made some appearance alterations by changing the color of eyes [url] and whitening teeth up [url], this week though we’re going to do something completely different. A trick you see in many pictures is to bring [...]

Welcome to another quick photohop tutorial, if you’ve been following me the past couple of weeks you’ve noticed that we made some appearance alterations by changing the color of eyes [url] and whitening teeth up [url], this week though we’re going to do something completely different.

A trick you see in many pictures is to bring a single color to the foreground; most of those images though have something in common even though you wouldn’t say it at first. The colors in the scene are of quite high contrast like flowers on a green field, doors on houses, etcetera and the objects which most commonly tend to be treated like this are made out of a single type of color like red, yellow or any other color you desire. Keep in mind though that it’s definitely not needed to use just a single color, you’re able to use the technique in this tutorial for as many colors within a single image as you like.

The key to this tutorial though is finding a good image; we will be taking an easy way out in this image so we don’t want to cut our item out since this would take time and unless you have some experience already doing so, probably will keep you with those rough edges and such.

What to look for

If you want a good image for this you could to make it yourself simple for the first time search for something red, red is a color which comes with a great contrast on many things in nature. Just think of a couple of things red you can think up off, there’s red flowers, red plants, red foxes, red ladybugs and I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find red colored beetles, fish, scorpions and whatever more as well. All of these items usually are placed in green (plant-life) or blue (aquatic) sceneries, giving you the desired contrast you’re looking for in this tutorial.

Taking out our ladybugs

After opening up your image in photoshop make at least one duplicate, I’ll recommend making 2 so you’ll remain with at least one original image for if you’d need it later. Select the top duplicate and go to select > color range, this will bring you up a menu as seen on the right.

In select go to reds (if you took something with red that is, otherwise pick your color), if you have previews on you should now be seeing something happening. I find the grayscale previewing the easiest method, everything turning up light will be selected after you hit OK.

Next we’ll invert our selection (if this is something new for you simply do shift+ctrl+i or select>inverse) and hit delete. This got rid of everything around which wasn’t in our color, as you probably saw on my preview though there was quite some white showing up elsewhere so let’s get rid of that. Simply turn off visibility on the other layers and erase what you don’t want showing up, I bet you could use alternative techniques here as well but this goes quite quick enough for me.

Finishing up the rest of the image

The next step is to gray out the background now, so select the first duplicate you made and desaturate the image by pressing shift+ctrl+u (image>adjustments>desaturate).

As you might notice though the ladybugs look a bit orange, when I personally think of a ladybug though I think of them as some sort of perfectly colored mini red battle tanks in the shape of an insect and that redness is something I want to see.

Thanks to Photoshop we have various options of changing the lightning, hue, saturation and color of things. We will adjust a thing called levels in order to bring out the light in the lady bugs a bit more, in order to do so we will alt click on create a new fill or adjustment layer. Check the picture on the left for what it looks like, you can find it in the bottom of your layer’s palette.

Having alt pressed select levels and be sure to flag “use previous layer to create clipping mask”. In the new dialog screen you see appearing up there’s three moveable points to be seen below the graph, by altering their position you will basically change the balance of colors in your layer giving you the ability to darken your pictures up or lighten them. As you will notice by doing so it results in pale colors starting to speak more getting back their desired tone.

Final words

You might also want to check out the other adjustment layers like color balance whilst you’re at it, also that can be used to darken up the red a bit more but asides from that also allows you to completely change the color. Let’s say you took a red flower but would rather have it purple? Color balance does the trick for you there.

For now though let’s keep it to this, above you can see the final image which I created for this tutorial. I hope your image turned out nicely as well, if you are in need of any assistance or have remarks, suggestions or requests definitely don’t hesitate to leave a comment.