How can I make a picture only black and white?

[doom1975]

If you have photoshop...
Does anyone know how to take a color photo and make it completely black&white, except for one or two parts..?
for example..say you have a picture of a little girl holding flowers, well how would you make the entire picture black&white, except for the flowers, which i would like to stay in color?
THANK YOU GUYS SOOOOO MUCH.

[JonPeibst]

Desaturate (Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate) the picture then use the history brush on the parts you want in color (history brush will only take them back to their former colors).

[benq99]

duplicate the layers, make a path around the flowers and cut them from the image. change the layer to b&w and then replace the flowers. should work in theory.

[shayar]

Okay, I haven't used Photoshop in a while, but this is possible and I could do it.

Take something like the magnetic lasso tool or magic wand tool and select just the flowers (or whatever it is you want to have in color). Then go Select -> Invert or something along those lines, to invert the selection (so everything BUT the flowers is selected). You could feather the selection a bit at this point too, it might make it more realistic, but you can always just experiment and see if it works that way. Anyway, after that you simply go Image -> Adjust -> Hue/saturation/lightness or something like that and drag saturation all the way down to 0. Deselect and you're done (alternatively after selecting and inverting the selection you can just hit the Desaturate tool, which if I recall correctly is also in the Image menu somewhere).

Note that the above will make the rest of the image grayscale, not completely black and white. If you want it completely black and white, you can then go to image -> Adjust -> Brightness/contrast and set the contrast up to max. Note that this won't end up looking very good.

[shailesh.b.patel]

Lasso area to be B&W.

Image - Adjust - Desaturate

[dotcom1]

Use the lasso , or the pen tool to select the flowers now you don't want to ruin it if it goes wrong. So just copy the layer and now right click and select inverse.

Now every thing in the second layer is selected except the flowers press delete.

Go to back layer and press CTR L+SHIFT+U this will cause an desaturation now. Go to the parent layer

and play with the blending modes to produce cool effects.

and if the color blending or the lights don't suit you simple. use the blur tool to get them nice and smooth.

[Javed]

Try these step-by-step tutorials:

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/cp/olympus/technology/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001700324

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/ss/partialcolor.htm

http://www.tipclique.com/tutorial/photoshop/adobe-photoshop-tutorial-selective-color/

[Jenny19]

Add a layer mask to the part you want to remain as color. Then convert image to Black and White or Grayscale. The color remain under the mask. Use the magic selection tool to select the flowers and add a mask to them. Then convert to B&W.

[fundu]

If you are novice then use google's Picasa to give your photos some cool effects. It turns image into B/W and sepia etc. If you have photoshop then try read above posts to convert it to B/W

[Righteous_Trespasser]

Firstly desaturate the background layer so now it is black and white, then add a new layer on top of that one ... now select only the flowers with something like the pen tool ... then colour it in with the colour that you want, now change the blending mode to "soft light" or "overlay" both of those will work ...

[Dartz]

It's best to use a magic wand tool to select the flowers, then invert the selection and use a monochrome filter. Not all that hard an effect but it yields some really good results. Same technique can also be used to fix red-eye effects from photographs.