how do you make a object in a picture color

[sequin_shoes]

but the rest black & white without using photoshop? i dont feel like paying for photoshop and i dont have it on my computer. so how can i get a FREE program???

[lnbolch]

Photoshop does make it easy, but one can do it in other programs as well. With free, you often get exactly what you pay for.

A program that supports layers - Paint Shop Pro for example - lets you duplicate the initial image onto a new layer. Desaturate it and click on layer mask. Now you have a coloured layer on the bottom and a B&W layer on top. Use an air-brush tool to paint on the mask - black gives you transparency and white gives you opacity.

Using black, reveal the whole object. No need to be careful. Once it is visible, switch to white and now carefully paint so the object and the object only is visible. If you overdo it, you can always correct by going to the opposite. Very simple.

If the program does not support layers, use the selection tool to outline the object. Via the menus, invert the selection, so everything except the object is selected. Use whatever means the program has to desaturate the stuff in the selection. Not nearly as elegant and easy as with layers, but it works.

There is an illustrated tutorial at
http://www.larry-bolch.com/mask-intro/

[Dan A]

GIMP is free on the internet, and is a powerful editing tool. A bit less friendly and lacking in features than Photoshop, but the price is right and it does support layers and masking.

Photoshop and the others do have quite a learning curve involved. It does take some time to learn how to use it effectively. But it is learnable.

There are at least a couple of methods to make a picture in black in white with selective color. One would be to cut out the part that you want to keep in color and paste it back in as a second layer on top of the original image. You can then change the underlying layer to black and white without affecting the cut-out layers.

Another would be to simply create a complete duplicate layer so that you have two layers of the same image. You would then convert the top layer to black and white and use a layer mask to only allow certain parts of the bottom layer (in color) to show through. Then after you are done editing you would merge the layers together before saving. Here's an example of this:

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/cp/olympus/...

The above tutorial is Photoshop based, but the idea is the same with GIMP.

Search on the net for "selective color" and you will find loads of information.