TECHNIQUE: Creating a Color Photo within a B/W Photo Effect

From YourSITE.com

*NEW
TECHNIQUE: Creating a Color Photo within a B/W Photo Effect
By Jeri Ingalls 2006
May 1, 2006, 00:55

Have you ever wanted to focus on a particular part of a photo, but didn’t want to crop it because the rest of the photo was interesting as well? Here is a technique you can use, and with variations, you could use this to do all kinds of experimenting with the photos you use on your layout to get all kinds of different effects.

The simplest way to do this is to use the selection tool to choose the area of your photo you want to focus on. You can change the shape to whatever you want, but since I want it to look like a picture within a picture, I’m going to go with the rectangle.

Next, choose Edit/Copy. This will save a copy of your selection on your clipboard. Now choose Selection/None to get rid of the selection on your screen, allowing you to make the changes to the base photo, the selection will still be on your clipboard, you will use it later.
Now I’m going to change the photo to black and white. The easiest way of doing this without changing the whole palette of the graphic is to choose Format/Hue and Saturation, and then slide the Saturation bar to the left as shown in the graphic below.

Choose OK and you will now have a black and white photo. Now you can go into Format/Brightness and Contrast to make adjustments to the black and white, I decided to lighten mine up a bit.
Now you want to bring your selected image back from the clipboard, choose Edit/Paste/Under Pointer, and you will have your color selection on a separate layer on top of the black and white photo as shown below. Line up the color photo with the black and white. *TIP – an easy way to do this is to choose the pointer tool and change the transparency of the color photo layer to 60-70 percent, this will allow you to see “through” the photo and easily tell where to line things up. When you are finished, switch the transparency back to 0*

If you want to make the inner photo look more like a real photo with a white border, it’s easy to do this with the Frame and Shadow command. Choose Format/Frame and Shadow, and use the settings in the example below to put a 20 pixel white border around the photo. Make sure the “Do not Merge Frame Object” box is unchecked as we want this to be a border, not a frame.

Before choosing OK, go to the Shadow tab and choose your shadow settings. I’ll attach a screen shot of my settings below. You may want to adjust your shadow size depending on the size of your selection to make it more realistic.
Go to Object/Merge All, and you are finished!

If you want to do something a little different, try rotating the photo before merging it, or try repeating this process with other areas of the photo to add multiple color pictures on top of your black and white. Also, before merging, experiment with the black and white if you want, change it to sepia, add some blue or red, there are all kinds of different effects you can get with your photos with this basic tutorial, just experiment!

© Copyright by YourSITE.com