Andy….
How about reducing the background to grayscale and giving it a slight blur. Leaves your daughter in colour and nice and sharp.
Colin
Colin,
I like that idea. Any suggestions on the steps to do this? I’ve been away from PSE 3 for awhile.
Thanks,
Andy
Andy…..
As usual there are more than one way to do this so here’s one and maybe other folks can suggest others…
1. Open image and have the Layers Palette open as well.
2. Duplicate layer and select (highlight) the top most one
3. Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and move the saturation slider to the left. Your Image should now be in grayscale.
4. Make sure your foreground colour is white.
5. Pick a soft edge brush and paint over your subject. You will reveal the colour.
6. When your satisfied with that result, hold the Ctrl key and click in the Layer Mask. You’ll get a selection appear around your subject.
7. Select the Layer under the adjustment layer and then Go to Filters > Blur > Gausian Blur and choose a blur setting you like
8. Save result as a PSD format file.
If at step 5 you over do the uncovering, change the foreground colour to black and paint over the mistake…it will revert to grayscale
Colin
Colin,
I did that and it looks pretty good. Any suggestion on enhancing the color of the subject? right now it looks a little washed out. Would this change if "lower" the saturation of the background?
Thanks for all the help.
Andy
Colin,
In steps 4 and "9", don’t you have black & white reversed?
Andy,
If you decide you want the background to be the original color but still blurred, click on the adjustment layer’s icon and move the saturation slider back to the center.
Mark…..
Quite right….I usually remember it as Black Hole but this time my memory had a hole in it…:-) I guess Andy must have figured this out.
Andy, if you want to enhance the colour of the subject, you can add another Hue/Saturation Layer, above the other one.
1.Make sure you have nothing selected and then Ctrl +click on the lower adjustment layer mask like you did previously. Then use Ctrl+shft+I to invert the selection
2. Add the new Hue/Saturation Layer and this time you’ll see the mask inverted from the lower layer. Double click on the Hue/Saturation Icon in the layer and when the window pops up you can tweak the Saturation of your subject.
Colin
