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I have just taken a picture in the snow of a farmer feeding his sheep from a tractor. The farmer is wearing a yellow flourescent coat and the tractor is red. I thought it would look rather nice as a B&W picture with just the farmer and tractor in colour. Is there some way of doing this in LR some other image adjustment program?
Sorry for acting thick but don't know what LR is? I'd use the lasso tool in photoshop to very carefully pick out the farmer and tractor, create a layer of them and using channel mixer at red 20 green 60 and blue 10 in monochrome remove the colour of the background with that method. The blacks will be black and your whites lovely and white with a nice range of greys.
Lovely photo 
Photoshop or such that has layers.
Duplicate the layer, make it black and white, and use the eraser on the new (b+w) layer to rub out the black and white part you want to allow the colour to show through. Do it carefully at high magnification and you will see the coat and tractor show through. When happy, flatten the image.
I'm sure there are tutorials on here if you search for 'selective colour' or 'colour popping'.
Nick
I'm not a big fan of selective colour, but all you'd need to do is convert to mono & then use the history brush to bring back the colour where you want it. I'd also lighten the shot as it's a bit dark & rotate a bit to the left to straighten it to finish it off.
hI,
As you can see this is possible. This was a quick edit done in LR4.
First you need to correct the white balance to take away the inevitable snow colour cast.
ONce the WB is correct then you can use the HSL sliders to remove all of the colours except for Red and Yellow. The only potential issue is that the sheep and the trees have a little of these colours and so to remove the colour from them I just used an adjustment brush with 0 saturation and drew over them.
I also played with the contrast a little as I prefer contrasty images and also added a slight vignette.
Hope that is clear. Also you could be a lot more accurate and creative with both the original file and spending a little more time and care.
Quote: First you need to correct the white balance to take away the inevitable snow colour cast.
ONce the WB is correct then you can use the HSL sliders to remove all of the colours except for Red and Yellow. The only potential issue is that the sheep and the trees have a little of these colours and so to remove the colour from them I just used an adjustment brush with 0 saturation and drew over them
Something else I've learned about LR 
If I'm doing colour popping I tend to use pixlr - duplicate a layer, desaturate and then paint back teh colour areas with the eraser
had a little play as a bove, and then auto tone, punch & colour sliders in LR
Thanks guys for the speedy response. I'll get into LR and have a play!
There are a million and one ways to do the effect. I used to use photoshop but I love the HSL sliders in LightRoom. However this is all easy incomparison to how i used to do it. I still remember using photoinks to paint colours on to a monochrome print to get the effect. Infact I was having a clearout the otherday and came across them.
Don't know if they still work....
Firstly I would " process " the Basic Tone controls to get the overall exposure, contrast etc.
Then possibly the easiest way of doing this " colour popping " in Lightroom ( LR ) is to use the adjustment brush to mask the whole image then use the erase brush over the farmer & tractor.
Then set saturation to -100, perhaps darken the shadow, increase contrast.
Close adjustment brush.
Boost vibrancy & saturation which will now only affect the farmer & tractor with then perhaps some TAT adjustments of the red & yellow in the HSL panel
Very interesting how many tasteful possibilities that one image provides.
I am not a great fan of "colour popping" but if I did want to do what the OP requests, I would edit in Lightroom and SilverEfexPro2 using the "retain certain colours" option.
If I only had LR, I would try selectively desaturating each of the colour channels until I got close to what I wanted and then run the local adjustment brush, with max desaturation, over all of the areas of the image that had no deliberately "popped" colour in them. Progressively use "new" brushes of ever-decreasing size, to accurately6 achieve the desired result.
I've never done this using Lightroom, in fact I don't like the effect anyway but a thought occurs to me.
When using layers and brushes to do the de-saturating (or the other way around) using CS, it's possible to correct any errors, going over the edge etc., by switching the brush to the foreground/background colour.
In fact that's about the only way to paint into tight corners. I
It's also the reason that using the history brush isn't really a good idea; although it will work after a fashion, you'll have no redress should you mess up.
So!
My thought was: can you make these corrections etc. using Lightroom?
Quote: My thought was: can you make these corrections etc. using Lightroom?
Yes.
You just switch the brush to erase.
In fact one of the tricks in LR is to deliberately go over the edge of the area you want as it is easier to erase the unwanted bits with Auto Mask switched on
Quote: deliberately go over the edge of the area you want as it is easier to erase the unwanted bits
Thanks Jeff, that's just what I meant.
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