You’ve probably come across beautiful photographs where everything else except for a particular color is black and white? If you ever wished to include similar images in your own portfolio, you’re in luck. In today’s article we will go over a neat Adobe Photoshop technique that removes all the colors except for one that we desire to keep in our image. But before we get to the process, let’s take a moment to understand what pictures like these are trying to achieve. Having a single color object amongst all black and white draws the attention of the viewer directly to the subject with color and makes it the most important thing in the picture. In a way the colored object becomes the main lead of the picture and the rest of subjects in the frame become supporting components.

Let’s us now take an example of the image below. We can see that the picture contains beautifully colored strawberries and it would be wonderful if we could make only those strawberries colored and the rest of the picture black and white. To do so, open up the picture in Adobe Photoshop.

Once the picture is opened up in Photoshop, go to the Select menu at the top left side of the tool. Clicking that menu will open up a drop down menu. From there select Color Range option as illustrated in the diagram below:

This will open up the Color Range window. As you can see from the image below, there is an option of choosing the provided colors or you can also choose a particular color from the image by clicking the option of Sampled Colors from the Select drop down menu as shown in the image below.

After that go to Eyedropper Tool as illustrated in the image below and click over it. Now move your mouse and click on that portion of the image which contains the color you want to keep. In our case, we click on the red strawberries.

This will highlight the area where that red color is present in the image. Now in our case we also want to keep the color of the green leaves of the strawberries. To include another color, we go to the Add to Sample button and select it as highlighted in the image below. Now go to the green leaves in the image and click over them.

This will select both the red strawberries and the green leaves but what we actually want is to select all the areas other than these two things. So do not forget to click the Invert radio button before hitting OK. It is evident from the image below that by doing so, all areas apart from the red strawberries and green leaves are selected.

Now go to the bottom right side of the tool and click over Create Adjustment Layer button and then finally click Black & White option as highlighted in the image below.

So that’s it! This is all you need to get the amazing effect of having just some particular colors in an otherwise black and white photo. See how dominant the strawberries appear and draw the attention of the viewer towards the image.