Photoshop picture black and white with colour (Lights)

Question

I came across this picture online and I want to try and create something similar.

Can anyone give me some tips on how to recreate this image?

I have tried the following:

Create new layer & saturate. Use the history brush to restore the lights.

It's not turning out the way I would expect it to, i'm a Photoshop beginner and this to how I would usually create a color splash.

Thanks

Answer 1

A very easy way to do it in Photoshop is to:

• create a new layer over your image
• fill it with 100% black
• change it's blending mode from normal to saturation (this will make the entire image b&w)
• start deleting from the black layer (with eraser, pen, whatever you like) the parts that you want to be in color

What the black layer does is act like a black and white filter. It's a really simple technique, see:

Answer 2

Another method, other than Alin's, is to use an adjustment layer.

• Click on the " Create new fill or adjustment layer" button at the bottom of the layers panel (1) and select Hue/Saturation. This will create the new adjustment layer on top of your existing image.
• Slide the saturation slider (2) all the way to the left, to desaturate the image.
• Now that your image is black and white, click on the layer mask (3) and use a black paint brush to draw in the areas that you wish to restore color to.

Giving you something like this:

Since you are new to Photoshop and might not know about them, Layer Masks are an incredibly valuable method of "erasing" parts of layers without actually removing the pixels. A layer mask works by showing or hiding parts of an image, based on a grayscale mask (black = hidden) and can be edited in many of the same ways a regular layer can be. It is always a good idea to avoid erasing or deleting anything in Photoshop, if you can. Do this by using things like Smart Objects and Layer Masks.