can you combine black and white and color in gimp?

[acoleman]

Since Christmas I've been playing around with my nikon d3100 and gimp. I'd like to know if you can take a black and white image and add colored parts to it. I saw an image, I believe it was on this forum actually a long time ago of a black and white picture of a little girl holding balloons, but the balloons were in color... that photograph has always stuck in my memory and I'd like to learn if you can do that in gimp and if so, how? Thanks in advance everyone

[PhotoRebel4]

The technique is called selective coloring, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't do it on Gimp. Just google search "selective color gimp" and you should be able to find a decent tutorial.

In photoshop, there are a couple ways to do it, and all of them I know start with a color photo. The technique can yield some nice results, but it's WAY overdone in my opinion.

[Mutter22]

I just did that in gimp. I took a colour photo, selected the area I wanted to remain coloured, inverted my selection so the rest of the photo was actually selected and then went to "colours" and "desaturate". Hope that helps

[Tito87]

If you just "desaturate", you're not going to get a decent B&W image-- all you'll get is an image with no color. Before you start thinking about selective coloring (which very rarely looks good, IMO), learn how to create B&W images. Just my 2 cents, anyway.

[acoleman]

Yeah, I'm in no way trying to do anything on a pro level or anything like that lol. I don't even know how to work the camera yet, really, I've just been playing around with gimp and was wondering if it could be done. Thanks for the advice everyone! I'll try it out and play around with it a bit

[Mutter22]

Originally Posted by Tito87

If you just "desaturate", you're not going to get a decent B&W image-- all you'll get is an image with no color. Before you start thinking about selective coloring (which very rarely looks good, IMO), learn how to create B&W images. Just my 2 cents, anyway.

Oooo thanks for letting me know that Tito87. I'm a complete newbie too and didn't even know there was a difference between a desaturated image / image with no colour and a black and white image. I have sooooo much to learn and it's good to know these things. How do you turn an image black and white? Do you turn it into a greyscale image instead?

[Tstandiford]

Originally Posted by acoleman

Since Christmas I've been playing around with my nikon d3100 and gimp. I'd like to know if you can take a black and white image and add colored parts to it. I saw an image, I believe it was on this forum actually a long time ago of a black and white picture of a little girl holding balloons, but the balloons were in color... that photograph has always stuck in my memory and I'd like to learn if you can do that in gimp and if so, how? Thanks in advance everyone

Try following this gimp video tutorial: Gimped! Gimp Tutorials: Gimp Video Tutorial - How to convert color to black and white properly using GIMP

It will show you one of the best ways to do this, giving you control to change the image at a later point without messing up the effect.

[Tito87]

Originally Posted by Mutter22

Oooo thanks for letting me know that Tito87. I'm a complete newbie too and didn't even know there was a difference between a desaturated image / image with no colour and a black and white image. I have sooooo much to learn and it's good to know these things. How do you turn an image black and white? Do you turn it into a greyscale image instead?

I have found these 2 methods to be very simple and effective. The tutorials have been put together by a fellow DPSer. They are for Photoshop, but I believe you can find a way to do them in Gimp.

Black & White Conversions CS5 - Calculations

Black & White Conversions CS5 - Gradient Map

[drr0b]

Originally Posted by Mutter22

Oooo thanks for letting me know that Tito87. I'm a complete newbie too and didn't even know there was a difference between a desaturated image / image with no colour and a black and white image. I have sooooo much to learn and it's good to know these things. How do you turn an image black and white? Do you turn it into a greyscale image instead?

The difference between black and while and merely grey scale (de-saturated) is contrast; i.e. black and white images include a healthy amount of err... black and while, while de-saturated photos are just grey. So you need to make the darkest parts of your photo black, and the lightest parts white... it makes a huge difference!