Anyone know how to make those pictures where one thing is in color, and the rest is black and white?? i.e. - A picture of a flower…the petals are color, but the rest is edited to be black and white. For all intents and purposes, we’d be using wither ArcSoft PhotoStudio, or Microsoft Digital Image Pro.
I use Paint Shop Pro but I believe the technique is the same. The simplest way would be to make a selection of the object to remain color and paste it into a new level. Then you can convert your background level to B&W.
There’s a lot of stuff people do with the alpha channels and such but the above would be an easy method. Of course making a selection that looks good without looking “pasted” is the hard part.
It would be easier (even in PSP) to convert the whole pic to B&W, then reset max colours to 16 million, and transparent spray paint the area you wanted in the colour of your choice, using the B&W image underneath to provide the shading.
djm
Transparent spray paint? Interesting. Never tried anything like that. But how does transparent paint show up and how do you restore the original colors?
Hey! Are you one of those photoshoppers over on the “It’s not News” site? A TFer by any chance?
Sorry, I am not familiar with those terms. I am not a photoshopper, whatever that is.
For spraying a colour, set a new level. PSP allows you to control the degree of transparency. Let’s say you have a b&w pic of someone holding a flower, and you want to colour just the flower yellow. Add a new layer, choose spray, set colour, and apply over the flower area. Adjust transparency and retry until you are satisfied.
djm
A TFer is a person who pays for the “TotalFark” membership over on Fark. They have frequent photoshop competitions, and they tend to get rather competitive.
I’m a photoshop user myself so I can’t speak for the other programs mentioned but in photoshop I would select the area around the colored flower that I wanted to be grayscale and desaturate it completely. I don’t know if you have a tool like that in your programs but that would be easier than cutting and pasting… if you feather your selection before desaturating it will give it a softer feel versus the “cut and pasted” look. look around in your menu options and see if you can find anything like that. I’ve done things like this a million times but only in Photoshop. If you want to see an example, you can check out some of my stuff at:
http://www.straycat82.deviantart.com/gallery/
theres a picture that I took of my wife walking in front of a brick wall where I took the color out of her and left the background in color (it’s the first thumbnail picture in the second row of the gallery).
I hope this helps some. Good luck with your project.
I think MommaTune was asking the opposite: the background
desaturated and one object in color (I assume it’s a similar procedure,
though). Like this one from your gallery?
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/25478346/
May I complement your talent, and your choice in women.
This one is also exceptionally cool:
That was my favorite. Great job on the color scheme StrayCat.
Do you use a pen or a mouse?
I know she was wanting the opposite but the procedure would be the same, just once you make your selection you invert it and desaturate the background rather than the subject. I couldn’t remember if I had any examples of the opposite so I just linked to that one.
Thanks for the compliments! 
thank you, I usually use a pen but sometimes I’m just too lazy to hook it up or I get into the editing before I think to get the tablet out so I have done a lot with the mouse as well. I go back and forth between both but not usually intentionally. Sometimes you just get an idea and you want to start crankin’ away before you forget it or lose your vision 
Does anyone else know if these procedures can be done in the other mentioned programs? I used Corel Draw five or six years ago but I hardly remember that and I’m sure it’s changed quite a bit since then.
I just tried it in The Gimp, a free, open source program.
Thanks for the tips.
I tried the Gimp once. I guess I’ve gotten used to PSP so I have a hard time learning other packages. We have Photoshop 7 at work.
I have both PSP and CS2, and while PSP is a very nice program, I’ve found I can do so much more with photoshop. I found I didn’t use PSP anymore and uninstalled it, though PSP is a much more affordable program. I haven’t tried doing what MommaTune44 asked in any other program, but I know a very good formula for photoshop.
Alcona
A very basic but effective and easy to use program for image editing is Picasa.
It is free and a very good way of storing your pix.
The trick is that once you have edited your pix you must store the edited versions in a separate folder on your PC. If you send/post and edited image straight from Picasa it will revert to the original version.
Apart from that, it’s fine and can make a huge difference to your work in just a few moments.
Slan,
D.