Trail closed, selective color

Or seconds, as the case may be. You may remember this post from a few days ago. It was also posted to my photostream on Flickr, where one of the comments expressed surprise that the selective coloring took no more than a few minutes relative to the rest of the image (total time was two hours).

The trick to getting the selective color so quickly was twofold:

1. I was fortunate in that the image is almost monochrome already (remember me saying that before?).
2. I was using Photoshop CS5

To explain: if I were to do this quickly, without the editing out of distracting objects and fine-tuned sharpening, the steps to create this would boil down to:

• Duplicate the original layer;
• Convert new (top) layer to B&W;
• Add a layer mask, showing all grey;
• Punch holes in the mask to let some color through;

Looking at it like this, you would think that I hand-painted each bit of color.  This should take a lot of time, no? Well, doing it that way would take a lot of time.

I did it a better way.  Remember that this is essentially a monochrome image.  Mostly green, with some blue and some orange.  That means we can almost safely use the Color Select tool in Photoshop to select the individual elements.  The sign, for example:

• Open Photoshop.
• Click “Select” in the menu, then “Color Range.”
• Click anywhere on the orange areas.
• Move the “Fuzziness” slider until all oranges are selected (you’ll get part of the trail and a few trees, too).
• Use the lasso tool (or marquis, which is what I used) to unselect (alt-click & drag) everything that I don’t want.

Repeat for the blues.