I am VERY new at this!
I am trying to take a color picture of my granddaughter eating a strawberry, make it black and white and then bring color back into the eyes and the strawberry. She has blue eyes. I can get it done except when I "erase" the black and white layer over her eyes to show the color from the layer underneath, her eyes look brown! The strawberry turns out the right color. I don't know what I am doing wrong. Could someone lay it out, step by step how I would accomplish my goal? I am using photoshop 6.0

HI - Im not familiar with PS6 (its prety old these days) but I am guessing you arent doing anything wrong except with the absence of other colors her eyes dont look as blue as they might usually. Erase the section to show the eyes and then select the eye section in the color photo and either increase saturation - or if necessary alter the color balance to push more blue into the eyes.

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If black and white layer is on top of your color photo, it should erase to the color below. I'm not familar with your version....but are you erasing at 100% opacity? If not maybe you are not erasing all of the black and white pixels.

if you post the photo, I'll try it out with PS6... just curious... why are you using such an old piece of software?

Here is the pic.
I now have photoshop elements. ANY help would be greatly appreciated. There are actually three consecutive strawberry photos for the series frame so if you can figure out my problem, could you give me step by step instructions? THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!

Hi
You know your her eyes are blue but they don't quite look it and with the black and white surroundng them they will further leach color. There is also a really strong orange (tungsten) color cast. I'm pretty sure you are doing the right thing - the blue just isnt strong enough to show well. To show you - in the first picture Ive just done a straight (quick)erase. The strawberry looks ok - but the leaves are yellow and the eyes are brownish.
In the second, I color corrected the color photo to reduce some of the color cast before creating the black and white layer to erase from. You can see now the strawberry is redder and the leaves are green. The eyes tended to be a bit green too so I create a selction of the eyes and used color balance to increase the amount of blue in them and lightened them as well.
Click on each photo to see larger.
I hope that helps

Attached Images

	PICT0879_wo.jpg (30.4 KB, 12 views)
	PICT0879-copy.jpg (88.0 KB, 14 views)

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As already mentioned, your color cast is bad. You need to correct the white balance first. Then that makes the blue come back-but still looks like a dark blue color.

I duplicated layer, corrected the white balance, I selected the eyes and copied them to a different layer. I then used the brush tool on 10% opacity set to color dodge and a blue color to brush & build up some blue onto the eyes. I don't know HOW blue the babies eyes are, but to me they appeared kind of dark so that's why I used the color dodge. You could build it up stronger.

Then duplicated layer, converted it to black and white and then masked (or erase it whatever your version can do) it to paint out the eyes and strawberries.

A bunch of different ways to do this, but I'm not familar with your version of software. (guess you said now you're using Elements instead of PS)

Please forgive the very sloppy paint job, just doing this "very" quickly. While I didn't have the time to do it, I would probably whiten & brighten the whites of the eyes-think that might help. I also like glint (not everyone does) and would probably work on making them more pronounced.

If you google you'll find all kinds of tuts on brightening up eyes and making them standout more. Good luck. (cute pic by the way and nice DOF)

(Shelleyrae...just noticed the video you did on this yesterday. Loved it! NEAT. You're getting a very nice collection of video's. Love the program you use for it)

Attached Images

PICT0879_1.JPG (204.1 KB, 14 views)

Ok.. I couldn't help myself... here's my shot:



The thing is.. these are all very good. I took a slightly different approach to mine.. of course, corrected that color cast from the camera but I don't typically convert to B&W when I'm going to do selective colorizing.. I usually just use a slight desat which still gives you that color look (you don't lose the color of the cheeks, ear, eyes) completely.. but enough to really bring out the color areas.

Done via Photoshop CS3, a bunch of layers, Screen mode blends and a few DFX filters.. and some sharpening which the original lacked.

Enjoy!