Hi,
I really like a colour (color) pop image now and then. I thought I’d take you through a simple way of creating one in the free paint.net image editing software.
Tutorial – Colour Popping
Colour popping is a technique used to make a photo black and white and then reapply colour to a certain object to make it stand out.
This tutorial will walk you through my colour popping technique using this image of a backstreet in Cuba to make the car stand out.
I used paint .net for this, but if you use GIMP or Photoshop the steps will be similar and you can use this tutorial.
This is a short tutorial with only 3 steps, showing how easy and effective it is to use colour popping on your own digital photo.
Ready to start colour popping tutorial ?
Step 1
Open the photo and create a duplicate layer (from the layers menu select duplicate layer)
Step 2
Make sure this duplicate layer is selected and perform a Black and White adjustment.
This is the stage that where you may want to tweak the black and white photo to get the best effect.
Step 3
Now for the actual colour popping, and last step of this tutorial.
Keeping this layer selected, select the erase tool and go over the part of the photo you want to restore (colour pop) the colour to.
You need to zoom in for this part to ensure the edges are accurate.
End Image
This is my final ‘colour popped’ digital photo of a backstreet in Havana, Cuba.
Hopefully this simple process will inspire you to not just take photo’s but be creative and confident in image manipulation.
Please let me know if this helped or have any questions in the comment section below.
Is this image a lie or falsely represented ? Well I guess it for a big discussion, but I don’t think so. All the colours (visible in the cars) were there when I took the photo. Because I made some of the scene black and white is it “Photoshopped” ? Well I guess so but is that always bad ?
Hope this helps !
Thanks
Ian