Adding/Subtracting Color
by Wayne Kaplan

These examples demonstrate a couple of techniques in Photo-Paint for working with color… or the lack thereof.

If you pay attention to advertising, you probably recognize the first technique shown. It has become very fashionable to emhasize elements of a photo or video, by rendering them in color against a black and white background. This is a fairly simple process in Photo-Paint. First, I created a mask around the costumed young woman. I mainly used the freehand and mask brush tools to create a fairly tight fitting mask. Then, I turned on the mask overlay in version 6, to ensure I had the correct portion masked. If not, I could simply invert the mask. Once my mask is set, I simply used the Hue-Saturation-Lightness effect found under Color Adjust to drop all the color out of the background. I just set the saturation to (minus) -100%. That’s all there is to it!

In the second image, I combined what were originally two black and white photos. I converted each grayscale image into a duo-tone in version 6 of Photo-Paint. Duo-tones are a great way to enhance what might be a very ordinary looking black and white photo. In order to combine them, I converted both back to RGB color. That way I could mask and copy one section of a photo and paste it into the other having a completely different duo-tone hue. This image is actually in use on a Web page I designed for a client. If you would like to see the rest of the web site, click here.