Creating a Color through Black and White Picture

Dec 15th, 2008 | By art rogers | Category: Phriday fotos, Tech Stuff

christmas-parade-08-25 I featured some pictures last week during Phriday Foto that had everything Black and White except the only important person in the picture, my daughter. Turns out this is pretty easy and can be done with a free program, so I thought you might be interested in learning how to do it.

First, you need Gimp. Gimp is a FREE graphics program like Photoshop, which is expensive. Gimp is not quite Photoshop, but for free, it rocks. Also, it works on either Mac or Windows. I first learned about it from Frank Turk who has a Gimp University blog with loads of tutorials.

Simple directions are first, followed by detailed directions and screenshots.

Simple Directions

Create a duplicate layer: Layer->Duplicate Layer
Desaturate the top layer: Color->Desaturate (pop up window->desaturate)
Erase the top layer where you want color to shine through: Tool->Eraser
Save As your picture in the format of your choice.

Detailed Directions

I’m going to post pictures of the progress as we go through. Click on the pictures you see in the article for a full sized picture.

For this process, I picked a Christmas Parade picture in which a very colorful lady presented a profile, but she blended somewhat with the other spectators in the original picture.

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For well done graphic work, everything is done in layers, so get used to adding multiple layers to an image. To create a duplicate layer, you need to select the layers menu and then duplicate layer from that menu.

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This is going to give you two layers in the layer menu toolbar.

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Next, you want to take all the color out of the top layer, which is called desaturatization. The easiest way to do that is to drop down the color menu and choose “desaturate.”

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You’ll get a pop up with several options. Just click the big desaturate button.

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This will give you a Black and White layer over the color layer.

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Then select the eraser tool from the tool tray, select the brush size you want and erase where you want the color to bleed through. (The more precise way to do this is to create a mask that will create a selection around the place you want to erase, but this is the quick, easy and dirty way to do it.)

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When you are done, from the file menu, click “Save As” and save the image. I created this by naming it “color through BW.jpg” and it automatically took me through the process of exporting it as a jpeg image.