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Colour Popping is a great effect that is surprisingly easy to do.If you haven’t already come across this effect take a look at Picture 1, a shot I took of a skater at last year’s Phoenix Festival in Tullamore.

The technique used to create this effect involves the use of some photo editing software, but before you get disheartened at this point this is not a technique that requires the latest and greatest version of the wonderfully expensive Photoshop. It can also be achieved in Photoshop’s cheaper cousin, Photoshop Elements and also in some free-to-download photo manipulation programs such as the unfortunately named Gimp.(GNU Image Manipulation Program).
(Click here for more info on Gimp image editor)

There are a few ways of creating this effect,

we are going to look at a simple method that should work well in different photo editing programs.

(If you’re already comfortable with using things like layer masks in Photoshop you can use those instead and this article will serve as an inspiration rather than a guide.)

Step 1.

The trick is to load the colour version of your original image into Photoshop (or equivalent), as the first or background layer.

Step 2.

Now create a copy of your image in a new layer above the first layer.

In Photoshop this can be done very quickly with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J on your PC (or Cmd+J on a Mac). You should now have two layers with exactly the same image in colour.

Step 3. With the new layer selected as the current/active layer (it should be highlighted in the layers palette) select the entire contents of the layer using Ctrl+A.

Step 4. Now convert the current layer to Black and White. In Photoshop, for example, this is achieved using the drop-down menus at the top of the screen: Image-Adjustments-Black and White.

Although the various image editing programs will differ in how they provide this feature, what you are looking for here is a way of dropping the colour saturation to zero.

(Another way to achieve this is to have saved a previous B and W conversion of the image and load that into a second layer instead of copying the first layer.)

Step 5. Now we get to the magic! With the Black and White Layer still active select the Eraser tool. You can play around with adjusting the size and the “feather-edge” of the Eraser tool then just start using it to remove parts of the Black and White layer, revealing the colour layer underneath.

If you’re comfortable with the Selection tool in your Photo editor you can use this to create a selection on the Black and White Layer of the area that you want in colour. Then just hit the Delete key on the keyboard and watch the colour pop through!

John McCormack
June 2011
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