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.

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?

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. The fastest and easiest way to transform a picture into a monochrome version is to check Monochrome, right below the Output Channel.
4. You picture is a monochrome image now. Before you reveal some color, you need to make sure that the foreground color is black.
5. Next step is to go and grab the Brush tool and you can paint inside of the image to bring back the color image.
6. 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.

Let’s say you want to color your type and are not sure which color to choose. Photoshop provides an easy way to sample colors from your image and apply it to the type. This may significantly help you reduce the options as to what color is the best for your type. How to achieve that?

Let’s say you applied type to your image already.

• Now, make sure you enabled the character box from the Windows menu. If you work on a PC, click on Windows at the top and select Character.
• Then you can click on the color to set the text color. A new dialog box pops up and you might be tempted to just click on it to choose a color. Instead you will move your mouse to the toolbox and click on the eyedropper.
• Get the eyedropper tool and click on different parts of your image to sample that color.
  You will see the text changing its color based on the click of the eyedropper.
• After you decided on a color, then you can apply different effects to improve the appearance of your type. In my example here I used drop shadow, color overlay and stroke.

This is one of my favorite examples of how you can mask type using patterns. You can define your own pattern or you can use Photoshop’s default patterns. Although I don’t usually prefer anything that’s default in Photoshop, for this tutorial I will use a Photoshop’s built-in pattern called rusted metal.

All of our work will accomplished using the blending options box.
To achieve the effects shown in this tutorial, I will only use the Photoshop’s blending options box. So let’s get started.

1. Open your picture in Photoshop
2. Apply the desired type. In this case I have an image with Hudson river so I typed Hudson view.
3. Now open you blending options box and choose pattern overlay or you can click on the fx symbol on the bottom right of your screen and choose Pattern overlay.
4. Select a pattern from the presets (or you can define your own pattern). I chose the rusted metal pattern. It is also interesting to experiment with other patterns, especially black and white as the white will be erased from its combination with black.
5. I don’t really like how my type looks now so I will click on the blending options and reduce the fill opacity( right below the Advanced blending) to 0.
6. Now I can go back to pattern overlay and up at the top where it says Blend mode click on the menu and choose Multiply.
7. Now this is a much better looking type. I would also reduce the opacity to 90 because the type looks too strong for my image. You can stop here or you can refine it even more.