Selective Colouring in Lightroom

[FrankLamont]

Selective colouring is in quite common use, nowadays. And it's not too hard to do in Photoshop, but what about Lightroom? Well, it's easier than it might seem.

Step 1

Refer to 'Starting'

Once you've opened your image and made any necessary tweaks, look over to the histogram. Directly to the bottom of it, and to the right, is the adjustment brush tool. You can also open it by pressing K. Once you've located it, slide the saturation level to -100, and make sure the feather is at 100.

Refer to 'Adjustment brush'

Step 2
Then decide what you want in colour. Begin by selecting a reasonably sized brush, depending on the amount that you want in colour, and painting generally around it.

Refer to 'Painting Around'

In the example, I've drawn an oval shape around the few houses I want in colour, and applied the -100 saturation brush to the rest of the image by painting it.

Step 3

Then, start to be more careful - zoom in if you have to.

Refer to 'Zooming'

Note that any mistakes or fix ups can easily be corrected by selecting the erase brush. Go back to A to paint the reduction in saturation again. Make sure that all final touch ups are not done in erase mode - it's better to have the tips of your object slightly less saturated than having blue sky showing. You can choose to lower the feather amount, but a lower feather will make the fine details harder to colour, even with a small sized brush, as it was produce a less graduated edge.

Refer to 'Erase'

The example below shows the difference in using the erase brush and a low feather to touch up the details, compared to using A (-100 saturation). On the left, you can clearly see spots of blue from the erase brush, and there are traces of circles from the brush, due to the low feather. The image on the right is the completed version.

Refer to 'Comparison'

Things to note
Watch out when using JPEG - because it is a lossy file, it will just get worse, especially around edges. Since this photo was taken in JPEG, and edited in JPEG, you can clearly see the loss that comes at each touch of brush.

Refer to 'Final'

So if you can't afford Photoshop, or just want to quickly get it over with, here's a perfect chance for you to achieve selective colouring in Lightroom. There are several other ways as well; this is just one easy method.

[FrankLamont]

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