Make Your Pics Pop!

Dan Mold shows you how to give your pictures a burst of colour by selectively desaturating the surrounding scene

- Dan Mold

Here’s a fun technique that leaves the viewer in no doubt of where to look in your picture. It’s called selective colouring because you’re editing the shot to remove colour in specific areas of your image, in our shot we only wanted the model and her vibrant dress to stand out so left her full of colour.

You’ll discover how to make full use of Layers, one of the most useful features Photoshop has to offer, allowing you to stack different images or adjustments separately. If you’re new to Photoshop or have never experimented with layers this is a really easy technique to get to grips with that will show you how they work – you can do it in either Photoshop or Elements.

Along the way you’ll learn how to use Layer Masks which is where you can hide part of a layer. In the case here we’ll use a Hue/ Saturation layer to remove all of the colour from the image, then paint onto the Layer Mask to hide the desaturating effect precisely over the model. Using layers is a completely non-destructive way of working as it doesn’t effect the original image – you can reverse the effect on any of your layers and go revert to the original.