Creating Impact With Partial Colour: 60 Stunning Photos

Colour is a powerful part of photography and it’s presence or absence is a great way to highlight and emphasise certain parts of an image. Although much of photography is about subtlety, there’s occasionally a time and place to make part of an image really stand out.

In today’s showcase, we’re taking a look at a selection of photos that use partial colour to stunning effect.

Partial Color

al mondo

patial color

Peugeot

And I Will Wait Forever if That’s What it Takes

Put you best foot forward

Post Box

Colors in B&W!

QANTAS Passes By

Green Jewels

New York Colors

Brooklyn Bridge

Black & White Colour Flower

Peindre la couleur

jogging with props

Fortune in love

L’amore atteso

A Whisper of Hope

La libertà è un diritto di tutti

Target Practice

Antiques

Torre de los vientos

Celica Hostel

Drink [Explore]

The Colour of Money

Ladybug

Fargo

Smile- God Loves You!

una giornata piovosa

Sevilla

En rouge et gris

City Tram

Baby Blue Umbrellas in a Black and White World

Westminster Bridge

Flightless

Australia Square Tower

Young Lady in Partial Color

Color My World

The Garden: Fire Partial Color

Colors of passion

el arte es basura

The Long and Winding Apple

WK Utrecht

Watermelon technicolor

Panamera Turbo

Yellow

Meh…

partial

Deutsche Bahn

rouge

But I see your true colors Shining through

Colour Bubble

Cartes à jouer

Beach Huts

Selective Reflections..

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.

Raia

We’Re All Made Of Allstars

Je t’aime plus

Ant BW & colour

Endurance

How to Create This Type of Effect

Post-processing a photo to add this effect isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. Although there are many different ways to add partial colour to an image, one of the simplest is to use Layer Masks in Photoshop.

All you need to do is load up your colour photo, add a Black and White adjustment layer, select the Brush tool, and then select the Adjustment Layer mask. You should then make sure that your foreground colour is set to black, and your background colour is set to white.

After that, it’s just a case of painting (in black) over the bits of the image you’d like to add colour back into! Aiming for a few different areas that each contain the same colour can work well, and this is an effect employed by many of the photographs above.

You can adjust your brush size and style as needed, and it might also be a good idea to play around with the colour saturation when you’ve finished (to make the colour area really “pop”).

More Great Tutorials

This is a really simplified guide, but here are a few more tutorials that you should check out to find out more:

• Black and white photos with just a touch of color
• Partial Color With Layer Masks
• How To Quickly Create A Partial Colour Effect In Photoshop
• Create a Black and White Effect in Adobe Photoshop (video)

If you’ve created “partial colour” versions of your own images, we’d love to see them. Feel free to leave a link in the comments, and thanks for reading!