This competition will appeal to all who love to dabble in a bit of post-production processing! We’ve asked for ‘monochrome’ and ‘colourful’, so this time we have opted for a little bit of both.
Selective colour photography is the process of photo manipulation in which you convert a photo to black and white whilst leaving an “accent” or partial colour on a photograph or a selected area. This is an effective way to draw the eye to an area or object in an image, or it can be used to add an element of fun to images; the idea is to be creative and enjoy the process.
Just as the human eye is attracted to bright areas in an image, it is also attracted to more saturated areas. You can use this as a tool to guide the viewer’s eye around a photo. It is the difference in saturation that the eye can spot not just high saturation. If you have even saturation all over your photo, you can’t control the eye through colour. If you only turn up the saturation on certain objects of interest in your photo, the eye will seek those out.
The way Selective Colour works is in a similar way, by decreasing the saturation from everything else but the subject. If you completely remove all colour, except a few elements, you will have a semi-black and white or selective colour photo. This technique can be used to create strong photos.