Photo Effects: Adding Focus To An Image With Color

Step 6: Colorize The Black and White Areas (Optional)

If you'd prefer to add some color to the black and white areas rather than leaving them, well, black and white, all you need to do is click inside the checkbox to the left of the word Colorize in the bottom right corner of the Hue/Saturation dialog box:

When you check the "Colorize" option, Photoshop automatically uses your current Foreground color to colorize the image, and your current Foreground color is the color you sampled a few steps back. If you look at the Saturation value, you'll see that Photoshop has also reset it to 25 so that you can see the color in the image. If you want to reduce the intensity of the color, simply click once again on the Saturation slider and drag it to the left. The further you drag to the left, the less intense the color will appear. I'm going to reduce my Saturation value to around 20:

Here's my image after colorizing the black and white areas with my sampled color and then lowering the saturation:

Step 7: Change The Blend Mode Of The Adjustment Layer To Color (Optional)

If you want a slightly different colorizing effect, go up to the Blend Mode option in the top left corner of the Layers palette, click on the down-pointing arrow to the right of the word "Normal", and change the blend mode of the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to Color:

Switch back and forth between the two blend modes and keep an eye on the colorized area of the image as you do. You'll see a difference in how light or dark the colorized area appears depending on which blend mode you have the adjustment layer set to. Choose the one you like best for your image. Here's a comparison of the two, with the "Normal" blend mode on the left of the image and the "Color" blend mode on the right. Notice how the left looks darker than the right:

I'm going to go with the "Color" blend mode with my image, since I think "Normal" makes it appear too dark.

Step 8: Bring Back Some Of The Original Color (Optional)

One final step you can do is to bring some of the original color back into the image, and once again it's very easy to do thanks to our adjustment layer. All you need to do is lower the opacity of the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer by going up to the Opacity option in the top right corner of the Layers palette, hovering your mouse over the word "Opacity", which turns your mouse cursor into the "scrubby slider" icon, and then clicking and dragging your mouse to the left. As you drag to the left, you'll reduce the opacity value, and if you keep an eye on your image as you drag, you'll see the original color beginning to appear in the colorized areas. I'm going to lower my opacity down to about 85% to bring back just a hint of the original color:

Once you've lowered the opacity and you're happy with the amount of color you've brought back into the image, you're done!

Here, once again, is my original image:

And here, after lowering the opacity of my adjustment layer to bring back just a hint of my original color, is my final result:

And there we go! That's how easy is to bring more focus and attention to part of your image with color thanks to the power and flexibility of our Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Want an easier way to learn Photoshop? Download our tutorials as Print-Ready PDFs!