Spot Color Lesson

Sometimes a color photo of a subject in a "busy" background can be made more effective by using the spot color editing technique. I use Adobe Photoshop Essentials 4 for my editing but any image editing software that lets you work in layers will do.

Here's a picture of historic Baldwin Mogul class Virginia & Truckee #20 at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. There are other museum exhibits in the picture as well as the overhead structure of the museum's rolling stock hall.


The first thing to do is change this to a black and white image. I do this by adding an "adjustment" layer on top of the original photo. This layer is a "mask" that makes changes to the image layer below it without changing the original image itself. I choose a "Hue/Saturation" adjustment layer. In the adjustment layer I turn color saturation of the entire image as low as it will go thereby resulting in a black & white photo. Remember, the adjustment layer changes how we see the original, not the original itself. The result is this:

Now the usefulness of the adjustment layer mask really comes into play. It you paint on the masking layer itself with a black brush, you remove the mask effect where you have painted, letting the original image below come through. If you remove too much you can correct by painting with a white brush. I just let some of the color of the locomotive show through to isolate it and call attention to it rather than all the "busy" black and white features and here's what results:


Finally after all this you can save your work with your editor's own format to preserve the layers or you can "flatten" the image which gives you a single layer incorporating all your changes you can save as a jpeg or tiff file.