Colour popping in Paint Shop Pro

Making a photo selectively coloured has been convenitently termed colour popping. Here Ashley Price shows us how to do it in Corel's Paint Shop Pro image editing program.

To get from the left photo to the right is a relatively simply matter using Paint Shop Pro (from now on known as PSP) with a technique called colour popping.

Step One
First let's load our colour start image:
It is often here that beginners make a fundamental mistake (yes, including myself). Because most of the image is going to be black & white it is assumed that the next step is to click on "Greyscale" to remove all colour. This is wrong and simply won't work.

Step Two
The next step is to add an extra layer – called an adjustment layer. Right click on the "background layer" in your layers palette and then click adjustment layer. From the new menu, click on "Hue/Saturation/Lightness". Alternatively, you can click "Layers" from the menu bar and choose "new adjustment layer" and then click "Hue/Saturation/Lightness" from there.
The following window will pop up:

You can see I have reduced the saturation down to –100 – i.e. removing all colour from the image.


Step Three
Now to re-add colour to the petals.

First of all make sure the adjustment layer is highlighted and that your foreground colour is black and your background colour is white.

Choose the paintbrush tool at a suitable size. When you click on your mouse and start to move it over the image you will see that the colour reappears.

Carefully go over the petals to reintroduce the pink colour. If you make a mistake, either right click and draw over (effectively using the white background colour) or swap the foreground colour to white and go over the incorrect area.

If you are careful and take your time you should end up with an image like the one on the right: