What’s Octoberfest without a pig roast? The woman ahead of me in the meat line was snapping a cell phone shot of her dinner, so I just shot her hand shooting her subject! Its kind of trendy to selectively desaturate a color image these days, and I get caught up in it too. Read on and I’ll tell you how I did it!

The original is just not a great looking photo, is it? Composition-wise, I liked it, but it has its problems. I shot it on the spur of the moment and didn’t have much time to set my controls (Canon Rebel XT with Canon 28-135 mm lens). I figured I could salvage it somehow in Adobe’s Photoshop.

The original was obviously in color, but had an overall bluish tone due to shadows, so I warmed up the image to make it appear daylight-normal. This isn’t necessary if you’re just going to desaturate the image (turn it into black and white), but my intent was to keep the cell phone’s display in color. Since I conceptualized this as my final product, I wanted the display to look natural. As far as a roast pig can appear natural….

Get rid of blue overcast with Photoshop CS:

I used Image->Adjustments->Photo Filter->Warming Filter 85 to about 25% Density on the slider.

Isolate the cell phone image:

Next, I used the magnetic lasso. There are 3 types of lassos–the magnetic one sort of follows the borders automatically, if there’s sufficient contrast. Select the phone’s display by drawing lines around it with the mouse.

Desaturate the rest of the scene:

Right click your mouse to Select Inverse (this lets you keep the lassoed part untouched, while you work on the rest of the image. The majority of the image can then be desaturated (Image->Adjustments->Desaturate).

Brighten up the dull-looking image:

Use the Brightness slider (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast) to do this. Maybe touch up the contrast a bit too.

Remove bracelet:

I usually don’t alter my images, but her bracelet just distracted from the cell phone. It also appeared that the hand was wearing a surgical glove! All real possibilities as an end product, but I just didn’t want it there. So I used the Clone Stamp tool to stamp over it. Blending the area with the surrounding hand area is much easier in BW than it is in color. With color, you have more subtle hues to deal with.

Sharpen the image a bit:

If you choose to sharpen an image, you always do so as your final step. I like to use Gaussian Blur (Filter->Sharpen->Smart Sharpen->Gaussian Blur) to fake a sharp image if my original is a bit fuzzy.

Summary:

You can easily get carried away with Photoshop, as there are so many ways to mess with your image. The thing I like about photography is using the camera to capture the image I see; I generally don’t use it as a basis for creating something new. I just don’t want all that “after-capture” flexibility; I need limits. Worse case scenario, you can spend the rest of your life making countless variations of the same image! I once asked a painter “How do you know when your painting is finished?” (go ahead, try and draw or paint something, you’ll see what I mean). She said, “Paintings are never finished–they’re abandoned!” It can be exhausting, knowing when to stop.