Selected Color Portraits

Artist Statement

For this assignment, I took portraits of my friend and myself and then edited them to have only a particular portion in color, and the rest black and white. I did this by photoshopping them. I created a gradient map, then selected what I wanted to be in color, and filled that with black, to void the gradient map and have the color show through. I then went in with a brush and colored in all the parts the select tool may have missed or over-selected to make the image exactly how I wanted. I often chose to select the subject of each photo and make it the portion in color in order to draw the most attention to it, but then I also selected everything else to again draw attention to the subject, but in a more solemn way. In the end, I like the majority of the pictures. I would like to improve them by being more precise around my subject's hair, but using only the trackpad and that fact that I'm inexperienced at photoshop made this difficult.