Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect
August 5, 2008
In this Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial I hope to explain how you can create the similar effect.
With the below image I wanted to create a dream like, in the past effect, and in this tutorial I will attempt to explain what I did and how you can also do it. This technique is very simple and can be used and manipulated for lots of other things.
Below you’ll see I used a motion blur - although this tutorial is on blurring, you can adapt it to change the background colour but keep the girl the same. All you have to do is think outside of the box and play.
Feel free to request something similar to this Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial.
Before
After
Additional Steps
Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial - The Steps
- Firstly open up the image you want to use for this tutorial (you can use the image above to try this out), if you don’t know how check this tutorial out.
- Now duplicate your layer. To do this, I use a shortcut: CTRL (win) / Command (mac) + J
- Now desaturate the image. I use the shortcut: Shift + CTRL (win) / Command (mac) + U
- Then go -> Image -> Adjustments -> Exposure… and once the little box appears change your settings to match my own here.
- Once you’ve applied the settings press OK, then go to your layer palette, locate the layer mode and set it to Overlay. Once that’s done you need to
duplicate your top layer (The overlay one). Leaving you with three layers
- Then go to your middle layer (E.g. Select your middle layer.) Then go Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set your settings to 3.0
- Now go back to your top layer and change it from Overlay to Soft light & change the
opacity to 50%
- Simple enough. That’s the main steps, anything after this will turn your image into the “Additional Steps” image that you can see above… so either save your image or carry on
Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect Additional Steps:
- Now press M on your keyboard and you should be using the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Once you have that at the top of Photoshop you’ll see a toolbar and there you will find a little
box that says ‘Feather’ next to it. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Take a look here. - Now inside that little
box I want you to replace 0 with 30 (ignore the fact that mine has 55 in it).
- Go to your image and create a rectangle in the middle of your image. Take a look at what I did.
- Once you’ve selected your shape go to Select -> Inverse. Once that’s done you’ll notice a change to your image. Take a look at what I did.
- Now go Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Solid Color… on this image I picked black, but you can do anything really, I feel black works best here.
Once you have your first black layer,
duplicate it! And then change the top black layer to Overlay… which will leave you with two black layers.
- You need to merge all of your layers now. Layers -> Flatten Image.
Once that’s done,
duplicate your layer and then go Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate.
- This is the more tricky part… select your eraser tool, select a soft round default brush, the size should be 30/40 and
opacity at 100%
- Once you have your brush ready you need to go to your top layer and begin to ‘remove the grey’, by that I mean… just erase whatever you want and you’ll see that it turns to colour…
While doing this, if you’re not used to erasing and doing things like this then I suggest you zoom in when it gets more tricky. I left the background black but I coloured her dress and the balloons.
Because I felt her skin was too pale I made my brush a bit smaller 10/20 and changed the opacity to 50% - then I very carefully and slowly went over her arms and face… I also slightly skimmed the eraser over her hair but I lowered the
opacity again… have a play it’s more personal taste.
- Aaandddd you’re done. I hope this Dreamy Selective Colouring Effect in Photoshop Tutorial was helpful - however if you have any questions regarding this tutorial then please leave a comment below and I’ll happily reply.
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