Paint with color on a black & white picture
Times Square filtered with Channel Mixer in Photoshop
In this tutorial, I will explain how to achieve an effect like the one you see in my picture above by masking an adjustment layer in Photoshop. In other words, you can mix a monochromatic image with color and reveal the color of a portion of an image. See below the original image.
Times Square original image
To start with, you need any picture but not a monochrome picture. You will convert it to a black and white at some point in the process. Ready?
- First open your photo and click on the adjustments panel. Make sure it is turned on ( go to the Window tab and click on it to enable it, if necessary).
- Now click on the Channel Mixer and as you can see, Photoshop added another layer above the image layer. By default, Photoshop will also apply a mask to it, that’s the white rectangle at the right of the channel mixer.
- The fastest and easiest way to transform a picture into a monochrome version is to check Monochrome, right below the Output Channel.
- You picture is a monochrome image now. Before you reveal some color, you need to make sure that the foreground color is black.
- Next step is to go and grab the Brush tool and you can paint inside of the image to bring back the color image.
- So, choose an object on your image and start applying the brush tool to it in order to reveal its original color. You can adjust the brush tool size to fit your object.