Selective Colouring

[wolfnowl]

Hi Folks:

Stumbled upon this yesterday... I rarely shoot people, but Marcia and I are putting together a book of her poetry, and she wanted an image of herself for the back of the book.  I took an image of her I had processed in Lightroom, created a Virtual Copy, and converted that to B&W.  At first I didn't understand what I was seeing, but there was still some colour to the image, in her eyes and her lips.  For the colour image I had accentuated these areas using the Brush tool, and I had set the colour box to a salmon colour for the lips, and added a hint of blue to her eyes.  When I converted the image to B&W, these brush tool overlays stuck.  I removed those two brushes and the image became truly B&W.

At first I thought it was a bug, but then I got thinking about old B&W images that have been hand-coloured.  Photoshop would definitely be better for this, but if you had a steady hand and a pen tablet (and more talent than me), you could create a B&W image in LR and then hand colour it.  This would be different than selective desaturating, because you can add colours that weren't there in the first place.

Mike.

[neil snape]

I have used the colour brush tool to correct for artifacts when using aggressive split tone. The new LR 3 tool is sometimes hard to reset to no colour, I don't know why.

What I usually do is retouch and edit a colour image in PS then make a virtual copy in LR of the edit image. Apply all the BW and tone I want, and work on that as a final copy. That way I can update the original edit image which in turn updates the vc, saving a lot of time.