Photoshop help

Make a copy of the layer, and work on the copy.

Select the part you want to remain in color.

You may want to feather the selection slightly.

Under 'Select', choose Inverse. Now everything *but* what you want to keep in color is selected.

Go to Image --> Adjust --> Hue and Saturation;

Slide the saturation to zero. This will make everything that is selected gray.

This is a quick and easy, maybe not always appropriate way to do it. Give it a try.

 

Whoops,

You posted that while I was typing.

Here are a few ideas:

1) Copy the layer

Go to Hue and Saturation as described above
Select Greens
Desaturate all of the greens. See how it looks
Maybe pick another color that none of the flowers are and desaturate them.

2) Use the lasso tool with a feathered selection and freehand select the flowers, manipulate as above

3) Use the magic Wand tool to select pixels of a certain color range. Tolerance is how many shades away from the color you touch it will select, and Contiguous is whether it will only select adjoining pixels or if it will select all of that color anywhere on the page.


These are off the top of my head. Someone else may have a better way with a layer mask or something . . .

 

That was a quickie using the magic wand and the lasso -- I would start it over, and check contiguous when I magic wand the yellow flowers so it doesn't pick up the yellow-green stuff around the other flowers along the sides of the gazebo.

I feathered 1 pixel there. Maybe should have done zero.

 

If you want to really mess around with the tones of the BW photo, work with it separately in grayscale and then when you're done, drag the layer over into the RGB work.

 

Change the Mode in the Image Menu to Grayscale. Change it back to RGB (via the menu, not UNDO). The image will look grayscale, but it can be edited in color. Set the History Brush source back to the original RGB image (top layer in the History Palette). Use the History Brush to paint the original color pixels back in. Adjust the brush settings as desired.
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My method requires no layer work, selecting, feathering, desaturation, masking, etc. I think it is easier than using layers, selections, and masking.

The History Palette shown in my screen shot shows ALL the steps needed to make the image I made.

As for "what's a layer?", I will leave that to the others to explain.

Photoshop is a complex program, and there are dozens of ways to do any particular thing. Learning them all is probably next to impossible. Learning layers is a good thing to know, and it will open a world of capabilities.

 

You got it. Very good!

Photoshop is our friend.

 

Good job!

About layers: Begin your work by copying the original onto a new layer. Whenever you do another step in a project, do it on a new layer. That way you are only messing with one thing at a time and you don't have to start playing with your history when you screw something up. You can easily go beyond the limit of the history and not be able to undo something, and increasing the number of slates in the history uses a lot of memory.

If you create a work by adding elements to it, make each element its own layer. That way you can move them around individually, adjust one without adjusting the others, hide items, etc. Layers are your friend.