Today was a typical Monday — back to work after a wonderful weekend with my family. It always causes a little bit of mourning for me. But thankfully, if I have to be away from my daughter, at least I work at an art college on a beautiful campus up in the hills. The view is inspiring. But of course, anyone who’s ever spent time around artists knows that along with all the beautiful things comes a lot of funky crazy things, too. Like this huge sculpture ball that sits haphazardly on the lawn. I love it because of its randomness. I also love it because of its cool colors.

I liked the green trees and grass in the background, but I felt that it took away from the bright colors of the ball. I created this selective coloring by making a duplicate layer of the background under Layers (You can do this in Photoshop or any image editing software. I was using Gimp). Then I simply erased the background (trees and grass behind the ball) on the duplicate layer using the Eraser tool. You basically erase everything you don’t want to be in color in the final image. After I had the background erased, I clicked back into the original layer and desaturated the color. Then I adjusted the layers a bit, making the background a little more contrast-y and the ball a little brighter.

This is a great technique for children’s photographs, too. It gives them a really cool timeless feel, like this photo of my daughter playing in the snow. I did the same thing with the layers, along with clone stamping out some power lines in the background to make it even more timeless.

Give it a try for yourself. It looks way harder than it really is. But watch out–it’s addicting!