How to Make Items or People Stand out in Black & White Photos

If you are into digital pictures this will be right up your alley.

Have you ever seen an image with only one portion or one object in color and everything else is in black and white?

That is the effect we are going for here – to make an item, object or person stand out by black and whiting (is that a real phrase?) the rest of the image.

You can see a good example of what I am talking about in the shot below or in the article’s header graphic above:

The girl and her clothes are in color and everything else is not. What do your eyes fixate on?

You can find more example photos prepared using the application, or filter tintii, on their Flickr photostream. If you’re on Flickr yourself, tag your photos with “tintii” to have them included in the stream – more views for you!

Tintii is offered as a plugin for Photoshop and Corel’s Photo application but it does also come with a standalone application to make your color manipulation a little easier (and free for those of us who cannot afford Photoshop!)

Download and install the correct version for your PC, Mac or Linux box as you can see below:

Then select what you want to install:

The first object is un-uncheckable as it is the main application and the standalone application we are covering. The plugins for Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro are able to be unchecked.

When the application is fully installed, launch it from your start menu and you will see this screen:

From this screen you can open your image by hitting the open button on the top left hand portion of the screen.

I choose a picture of me lying out in Aruba (before the baby). It takes me back to a calmer much more relaxing time”¦

The above shot is using the defaults just opening the image, Next up I will select each of the four images on the left side. They each activate another color or layer in your image. Click them and check it out. Here is the first item selected:

You can see I hit the greenish yellow button on the top and that activated the grass behind me. You can either uncheck the item after you use it or combine multiple effects. I will run through each of them unselecting the last.

The dark blue icon is selected and just my dark blue swim trunks are colorized.

The light blue icon activates the light blue color of the beach chair’s cushions. You can see it activates the chair I am sitting on and the one to my left. It activates anything the same color.

That last icon makes my tanned body show up. This looks very cool with me colored and everything else being in black and white.

Here I selected the grass and both blues together effectively coloring everything except for my body.

Now if these options are not enough for you feel free to tweak and tinker with the slides on the left. If you figure out how to use them effectively leave us a comment below. If you get the itch to register and install the plugins let us know how that goes as well!

Do you know of any other similar apps that achieve the same thing?

Download: Tintii