How Do You Do Color Accents in Photoshop Elements?

[August Mom]

I've been looking at your various Christmas cards and notice a lot of them have B&W photos with color accents (where a sweater has color but the rest of the photo doesn't, etc.) How do you do this? I played around with it a little, but obviously didn't know what I was doing because I have either all color or all B&W. I did find some other cool effects, though.

[pixelprincess]

I use Photoshop, similar to Elements. I think the functionality is similar so here are a few tips.
You can create the color accents using the blended filter effects or even duotones. You need to duplicate your color image, import it into a new document, convert it to b/w and reimport it on another layer into your original pic.

To do accents, you would need to isolate specific areas...eg. eyes, hat, etc and colorize them or convert to b/w. Make sure you keep your original intact and create layers to apply your effects. So if your layer 1 of boy with hat image is b/w, layer 2 would be hat only in color.

hope this is somewhat helpful!

[August Mom]

Thanks. That was very helpful. Do you have any tips on the best way to isolate different areas? Which tools do you like for this? This may be above my skill level. I've never been good at tracing around specific things in a photo. Practice, practice, practice I suppose.

[papal]

There was a thread on this a little while back:
http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=37&topic_id=129607&mesg_id=129607&listing_type=search

hth!

[pixelprincess]

The link Rashmi posted has some great info!! I use the polygonal lasso tool to isolate odd shaped areas, or the marquee for squares.

have fun!

[August Mom]

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a try.