Red Gate
Selective desaturation is a popular look in some fields of photography. Also referred to as selective color, it’s the type of photograph where one element is in color and the rest, black and white. The technique is a bit of a love-hate thing – some photographers and viewers love it, others hate it. Personally, it’s not my cup of tea but I’m going to walk you through the steps anyway. Today we’ll look at doing it during the RAW stage. I’m using Lightroom for it, but it can be done just as easily in Adobe Camera RAW and probably Aperture (I’ve never used Aperture so I can’t say for sure).
Original image
When you have a relatively simple image such as this one with the red gate, the selective desaturation process is easier and quicker to do in Lightroom. Here I want to desaturate all but the reds, so I’ll start in the HSL panel and pull all of the sliders other than red to -100. Doing this causes my reds to lose a little punch so I’ll pump them up a bit while I’m at it, in this case I choose +32. I just moved the slider until it looked similar to how the full color version looked.
Saturation panel
A little red in the top right.
You might notice up in the top right corner, there’s a little bit of red in some of the plants. It’s so minor here that you could probably leave it and no one would notice, particularly on the web, but getting ride of it is simple, so let’s do it. Moving up to the Adjustment Brush, create a new brush with the sliders all on 0 except for the saturation which should be set to -100. Set your size and simply paint over any stray bits of color until it’s monochrome.
Adjustment Brush
That’s all there is to it. When you have a fairly simple selective desaturation to do, it’s quicker and easier to do it in the non-destructive RAW processing stage. Tomorrow I’ll look at more complex images for which we’ll be working in Photoshop.
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