Photoshop - Color splash effect - Photoshop cs6

Hey everyone. I'm finally back from vacation armed with thousands of photos that I really don't know what to do with. So over the next few weeks, as I'm sorting through the photos that I took in London and Paris, I'm going to be releasing tutorials and providing you with the images so you can follow along. This tutorial is going to cover a topic that I get asked about quite a bit, especially with mobile applications like Color Splash that allow you to isolate a specific color in your image. In this image we're going to attempt to single out the red phone box, leaving everything else black and white. If you want to download this image, it's available right now on IceflowStudios.com. Now there are few ways that we can go about singling out the red in the phone box. But for the sake of this tutorial, we're going to be using one of my favorite selection methods, Color Range, which can be found under the Select menu at the top. This feature works by allowing you to select specific colors in your image, either by choosing a basic color from the drop down, or by sampling your colors of choice. In most cases, however, choosing a color from the drop down might not be your best bet as it's super specific. If I select Reds, looking at the preview, you're going to notice that the phone box isn't completely white, which means that not all of the reds have been selected. Also, changing the selection preview at the bottom to Black Matte shows us that our selection is somewhat faded, which means that not all the reds have been selected. Let's try out the sampling method. This allows to sample multiple shades of the base color that we want to select. Clicking on the phone box will sample a range of reds, defined by our Fuzziness slider. A higher value will include more similar tones, while a lower value will restrict the sampling to the specific red that you selected. Now if there are any reds that have not been selected, holding down your shift key and clicking on the additional tones will include them in the sample. As you select a larger range of tones, you might start to see areas outside the phone box being selected. There are two things you can do to help alleviate this. First, like we covered a moment ago, the Fuzziness slider can help increase or decrease the amount of similar tones that are being included in the selection. You also have the Localized Color Clusters option and the Range slider. This can help focus your selection around the area that you've been sampling. A lower range value will tighten up the selection around your subject. Even after you've adjusted these sliders, you may want to go back and shift-click on the areas that have been removed. Your results not going to be 100% perfect, but we're going to deal with that in a moment. Once you're happy with the sampling, because we want to change everything except the phone box, go ahead and turn on the Invert option and press OK. This will give us a selection of everything else in our photo. From here, if you want to turn everything else black and white, your best bet is going to be to add an adjustment layer to keep our edit nondestructive. This also gives us the ability to tweak the effect if needed. For example, the sign in the background got included in our selection. Because the adjustment layer includes a layer mask, we can grab a white brush and paint over top of the sign to remove its red tones. The opposite works as well. If there are areas of the phone box which were not included, a black brush will bring back the reds that got lost in the process. And there you have it, a very simple way of singling out a color in Photoshop. If you want to download this image and try it out for yourself, or to check out other Photoshop CS6 tutorials, head on over to IceflowStudios.com. Take care.