In this simple tip we’ll see how to get the Pleasantville-style black and white with color accents look.
Here’s our colorful starting image by *Micky…

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Our first step is to select all the elements of the photo of the color we want to keep. Fortunately Photoshop has a tool to do just that - go to Select > Color Range and it will bring up a dialogue like the below. You can now click with the eyedropper on the color you want to keep to select it.

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I’ve used the plus eyedropper and a low fuzziness value to gradually build up a selection of all the yellow parts of the image. I’ve selected a White Matte in the “Selection Preview” drop down to show up the areas that I’m selecting. Once you’re done with your selection, click OK and you’ll now have a marching ants selection of the color range. We want to use this as a mask for our next step of removing the color from the rest of the image so invert your selection (Ctrl+I) to select the parts of the image that aren’t our chosen color.

Now we can add either a Hue/Saturation or Black & White adjustment layer to desaturate the rest of the image. A Black & White adjustment layer will give you more control over the look of the rest of the photo so use that if you’re comfortable with it. When you add the adjustment layer, the current selection automatically gets used as a layer mask on that adjustment.

You should now have something that looks a bit like this…

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As you can see my color selection has spread onto the red Skittles so I’ve just tidied that up by clicking on the adjustment layer’s layer mask in the layers pallette and then painting white over the areas I don’t want to be colored. Here’s the finished image:

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