How To Create the Color Splash Effect On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to apply a color splash effect to your pictures in the Mac Photos App.

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So you have a lot of photo adjustment controls in the Mac Photos App. One of the things you can do is desaturate your photos. In other words turn them from color to black and white. But you don't have to do that for your entire photo. You can do it for some colors and not for others. You can use this to create a color splash effect where you pick out a specific color in a photo and highlight that and fade everything else back to gray scale. Let's take a look at some examples.

So let's start off with this photo here of some kayaks. You can see the kayaks are yellow. So we can work with that yellow. Let's go to Edit and then what we're going to do is we're going to go to Selective Color. Now Selective Color gives you six different colors across the top. Then for each of those you can adjust the Hue, Saturation, Luminance, and Range. So we're going to go and figure out which of those colors is closest to the one that we want to highlight. In this case, of course, it would be yellow. So for everything, except for yellow, we're going to select that color and desaturate. Go all the way down for each one. Once we have done that the picture is mostly gray scale except the yellow which is still there a little bit.

What we're going to do for that is the opposite. We're going to Saturate that. We're going to bring that up to whatever we want. We can go to the extreme or maybe something a little less than that. So you see now we have the desired effect. The yellow is highlighted. Now Luminance will actually make that brighter or darker which could also enhance the color.

Now, of course, there's way more than six colors in this photo. The range determines how much this individual selection effects colors near it. So colors near yellow. If we take it down it will have less colors near yellow. If we bring it up and more colors will be brought out that are closer to yellow. In this case it works just fine in the middle. We can actually fine tune this color. Instead of pure yellow we can click the Eyedropper tool and select yellow from the photo here. This doesn't make too much difference here since that was so close to pure yellow. But in other photos it will help bring out that particular color. So you want to do that just for the color that you're highlighting.

Note that you don't have to bring everything completely back to grayscale. I could go in here and add some saturation for these other colors here just to bring some color back in while still emphasizing the yellow. Here's another example. Let's emphasize the color here in this mushroom which isn't red exactly but it's close to it. So we're going to go with all the other colors except red and bring the saturation for those down. Then we'll go to red but instead of just using red as is we'll use the Eyedropper tool, select something in here that better represents the color. Then we will bring up the saturation for that. 

Another thing you can do is change the color or actually change the hue of the selected color. So I could bring it over to the right and you could see I now have a yellow mushroom. Bring it over to the left and now I have a purple mushroom. What you get is going to depend on the color that you start with. You can create some interesting effects using that. 

Sometimes you really don't want to completely deemphasize the color around it. But you can see here how you have this nice red flower but the green is just too bright around it. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to first take the red here and add some saturation for that. I'm going to take other colors and desaturate them but not all the way. But I'm not going to touch green yet. Now I'm going to go into green here and I'll add a little bit saturation for green as well. Now you can still see that these leaves are green but the flower stands out a lot more. If you click on this button here you can swap the original and the one with the adjustment. So click that down and you can see there's the original and here's the one with the adjustments. So you can see the flower stands out a lot more even though I haven't completely removed the green from the leaves around it.

Here's an example where you can do things with two different colors. So I'll Edit this and let's bring out the red in these Highland cows. So I'm going to go to red here, click on the Eyedropper tool and select something that's a little closer to the color there, add some more saturation to that. For other colors I'm going to desaturate and this will create a nice image in itself. But what I want to do now is go back to the green here and bring back the saturation of the green. Maybe use the Eyedropper tool that fits that green a little bit better even. Now with green selected I can use the hue to change the color of the green. So if I bring that down a little bit you can see it actually changes it to more of a tan. Now instead of a green field it's kind of a drier tanner field.

Now the problem with this technique is, of course, sometimes the color sometimes exist in more places. So if I want to emphasize the color in this fabric here I can do it but it's also going to bring out the color in the buildings. So I'll go to red. I'll click here and take a sample from that. We'll increase that a bit and I will desaturate most of the rest of the colors. That works great except it really also brings out the color here. So what do you do in that case. 

Unfortunately Photos isn't going to allow you to do this on its own because you can't select an area of an image in the photo. But it's pretty easy to do that in one of the standard  apps that a lot of Mac users use. For instance Pixelmator or Acorn or something like that. As a matter of fact it's easy to edit the photo right from the Photos app. So right here I could take this button here and choose different filters provided by those apps. So there's the Pixelmator Pro Filter. But I find that I have better control, in a lot of cases, if instead I exit the editor here and go to Image. Then go to Edit With and you could see I could select all these different tools that allow you to edit photos including  Pixelmator Pro. That's here at the top because it was the last used application. 

I'll open this up in Pixelmator Pro. Just as an example of how to use a third party tool to do this I will take this. I'll duplicate this background here. So now I have two copies of it. With the frontmost one selected I'm going to select the Quick Selection Tool and highlight the monk really easily. Every editing app has different ways to make a quick selection like that where you can draw carefully around the object yourself. But here I've done that. I'm going to go in and invert the selection. So now I've selected everything but the monk. I'm going to hit the Delete key to delete everything around there. You can see now that one layer is just the monk. The other layer is everything else. So let's get rid of the selection. 

I'll select the background layer here. Go to Format, Color Adjustments, and then Hue and Saturation. That'll bring up Pixelmator's Hue and Saturation controls. I can see them here and I can desaturate everything except that the monk in the other layer is not desaturated. It's just everything in the second layer that is. Now we can go to this layer and I can go to Format, Color Adjustments, Hue and Saturation here. It'll bring that up and I can super saturate the monk there to bring that out.

Now since I started this by using Edit With in Photos all I need to do is Save and then Close. Now I'm back in Photos and I can see it saved the edits I made in Pixelmator Pro. The same thing would happen if I was using Acorn or another app. Now I have the fabric here nice and colorful but the buildings are all gray scale. Note that all editing in Photos is nondestructive. In other words I can go to Edit here and I can see the original there by clicking on that button. I can always revert all my changes back to the original photo in clicking this button, if I wish. Even changes made in an external editor.

So with these techniques you can take some of your original photos and apply the color splash effects to create stunning new versions of them.