Hello and welcome to my first “official” blog post! In case you didn’t know, I am currently doing an internship with the Johnstown Tomahawks hockey team here in Johnstown. The internship is marketing and public relations based, so I have been learning a lot of things that I didn’t know before due to my production background. While I have been familiar with Photoshop, I do not know how to do everything when it comes to making flier and other marketing materials. I am more familiar with Lightroom, so I am learning new things to become more familiar with Photostop every day.

Now, I know that many people already know how to do this, but on the off chance that someone does not (like me this morning) I want to explain a quick and easy way to make part of a photo black and white, and part of it color. I have been working on designing ticket voucher booklets to be used throughout the year as a flexible season ticket alternative. A few weeks ago, I designed the book and tickets and my supervisors have been reviewing it and decided that they wanted a different ticket design for all 10 of the tickets that would be in the booklet.

I was working on a design today that looked very good in color. However, I noticed that it would look a lot better if the people in the photo were the man subject, rather than all of the people in the stadium around them. So, I decided to make the background black and white and to leave them in color. The only issue was that I didn’t know how to do this in an easy way.

So, after some research, I found a very simple solution. The first step, is to open the photo in photoshop. Now, when you open new picture, a lot of times the background layer is locked. Make sure that you have that unlocked and that it says ‘layer 0’. Next, you are going to want to right click and select duplicate layer. Once that is done, select the new layer, ‘layer 0 copy’ and then go to where it says image on the top left corner of the screen (the menu bar). From there, you are going to choose adjustments and then select black and white. A thing will then pop up that will have you adjust those colors individually if you want. However, if you just click on okay, it will convert the photo to black and white. The next step is to take the eraser tool, and simply erase the spots that you want to show up in color. Because you have the colored layer underneath, that is was is going to show through.

Finally, save your picture as a JPEG, or whatever file type you prefer, and you should have a black and white picture with some color peaking through.