Selective color

After seeing a handful of pictures online/on flickr processed for selective color I decided to give it a shot. Here is my final shot:

I'm really happy with how it turned out and you can see the original in my flickr stream/Silvermine Set. So far everyone has said, "wow, cool, how do you do that!?" So here's how I did it:

First you need an editing software...and I use Photoshop CS4.

1. Import your picture to CS4

2. Create an adjustment layer for hue/saturation

3. On the new level decrease the saturation to -100 on the right slider, making it a black and white shot

4. Select a soft round brush with an opacity of 50-75 and a color of black (with this essentially cut through your top black and white layer and reveal the original color version below.

Tips: Zoom in/out and change your brush size according to how detailed you want your final image to be. You can also change your brush opacity if you want to blend or gradually go from black and white to color in some areas. Most important is that it just takes practice to figure out what you want/what ou like.

Edit: I realize there are a ton of different ways to achieve this effect, but this is the way I did it. It was relatively easy pending your knowledge of  your editing software.

Noxolo