Selective colour

The Selective Color adjustment, and the 9 colour families it edits

The Selective Color adjustment splits the picture into 9 families and lets you push 4 process inks inside each one independently. Pick a family from the Colors: dropdown at the top of the Properties panel: Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, Magentas, Whites, Neutrals and Blacks. Then move the 4 sliders, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, each running from -100% to +100%.

The sliders are named after printing inks because the whole model is borrowed from prepress separation, where colour is described as halftone dot coverage rather than as an RGB value. That has one consequence worth memorising: each slider moves toward its own ink and away from its complementary colour. Dragging Cyan to -40% inside the Reds family removes cyan from red pixels, and since cyan is the complement of red, red is what you get more of.

The last 3 families are selected by brightness, not by hue, and they are where the useful work happens:

• Warm the highlights by choosing Whites and pushing Yellow to about +8%.
• Cool the shadows by choosing Blacks and pushing Cyan to about +6%, which is the honest route to the split toned look people reach for a preset to get.
• Add density to a flat midtone by choosing Neutrals and pushing Black to +3%, then stopping, because Neutrals covers most of a normal frame and small moves there go a long way.

Correction with this adjustment is non destructive when you use the adjustment layer rather than the menu item, so you can reopen it, mask it, or drop its opacity later. Save a setting you like from the panel menu at the top right of the Properties panel and it will appear in the Preset dropdown next time. If you want a repeatable one click version, record your own action from Window > Actions, which takes about 2 minutes and will be built on your file's numbers rather than somebody else's; a downloaded action is set to the tones of whatever image its author had open, and if you do download one, take it from the author's own site and read the licence.

Relative and Absolute, and the setting that makes it look broken

Relative and Absolute are the 2 radio buttons at the bottom of the panel, and they decide whether your percentage is a proportion or a flat amount. Relative changes the ink by that percentage of what is already there. Absolute adds the number outright.

Take a pixel already carrying 50% magenta and drag Magenta to +10%:

• Relative adds 10% of 50, so the pixel lands on 55% magenta.
• Absolute adds a flat 10, so the pixel lands on 60% magenta.

The important half is what Relative cannot do. A pixel holding 0% yellow has nothing to take a percentage of, so under Relative it stays at 0% however far you drag. That is the single most common reason someone reports that Selective Color is not working: they are trying to add an ink to an area that has none of it, in Relative mode. Switch to Absolute and the slider starts moving. Use Relative for gentle grading where you want the correction to fade out naturally in areas that barely contain the colour, and Absolute when you need a specific ink laid down regardless.

The one colour on a black and white frame, and what gives it away

The effect that most people mean by selective colour, a mono photograph with a single red object left in colour, dates a picture on sight, and there are 3 specific tells. This site published the technique twice in 2007 and both versions taught the eraser. This is the correction.

1. Look at the edge. The 2007 method duplicated the layer, ran Image > Adjustments > Desaturate at Shift Ctrl U, then rubbed the mono layer away with the Eraser Tool. An erased edge does not follow the object: it overshoots into the background and undershoots into the object, leaving a thin grey rim on one side and a smear of colour on the other.
2. Look at the greys. Desaturate averages the channels, so a red coat and green grass of similar brightness collapse to almost the same grey. A real monochrome conversion separates them. That flat, undifferentiated grey is the strongest date stamp in the picture.
3. Look at the saturation of the object that was kept. Nothing was done to it, so it sits at full original saturation inside a frame that now has no other colour to reference it against, and it reads as pasted on rather than as remaining.

Beyond the execution, the idea itself belongs to roughly 2005 to 2010 in wedding and stock photography, and a competent version will still be read as a period style. Two uses survive that judgement: a technical or product illustration where one item genuinely has to be identified among identical ones, and a grade that pulls saturation down everywhere except skin, which is a subtler operation and does not announce itself.

Building the same idea now, if the job genuinely calls for it

To build a selective colour frame that does not carry those 3 tells, replace the eraser with a mask and the Desaturate command with a considered conversion.

1. Add a Black & White adjustment layer from the Adjustments panel.
2. Set its 6 sliders, Reds through Magentas, until objects that were different colours land on visibly different greys.
3. Select the object you are keeping in colour. Use Select Subject from the Contextual Task Bar for anything the automatic selection understands, or Select > Color Range when the object is defined by its colour rather than by being the subject.
4. Feather the selection by 1 to 2 px with Select > Modify > Feather, or Shift F6.
5. Click the mask thumbnail on the Black & White layer and fill the selection with black, which lets the original colour show through only there.
6. Clip a Hue/Saturation layer above it and pull Saturation to about -20, so the kept colour belongs to the same photograph as the greys around it.

Every step above is reversible, which matters more than it sounds: the mask can be repainted a week later, and the erased version cannot. The same masking discipline runs through Removing a background in Photoshop, and the wider index of operations sits on Photoshop, operation by operation.

Selecting by colour, and what to do once you have the selection

Selecting by colour in Photoshop is Select > Color Range, not the Selective Color adjustment, and the 2 get confused constantly. Open it, click a pixel in the image with the eyedropper, then raise Fuzziness, which runs 0 to 200 and controls how far from that pixel the selection reaches. Hold the + eyedropper and click again to add another sample. Tick Localized Color Clusters and the extra Range slider appears, which stops the selection jumping to a matching colour on the far side of the frame. Sample a colour that is open in another document by holding the Eyedropper Tool down and dragging outside the canvas, which reads any pixel on screen.

With the selection live you have 4 choices, and only 1 of them is destructive:

• Click the mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide that colour, which is how you make it transparent and keep the option to change your mind.
• Add an adjustment layer while the selection is active, and the selection becomes its mask automatically.
• Press Backspace on an unlocked layer to delete those pixels outright, which cannot be undone once the file is flattened and saved.
• Use Image > Adjustments > Replace Color instead, which combines the same sampling with a hue shift in one dialog, and is covered in full on the page about changing one colour in a photo.

When the adjustment is greyed out or the menu item is missing

A greyed out Selective Color or Color Range has 3 ordinary causes. Check Image > Mode first: an Indexed Color or Bitmap document restricts the adjustment list, and switching to RGB Color restores it. Check what is highlighted in the Layers panel second, because an adjustment layer or a group selected instead of a pixel layer disables several commands. Check the bit depth third, since a 32 bits per channel document offers a shorter list than an 8 or 16 bit one.

There is no default keyboard shortcut for Selective Color. Assign one from Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, reached with Alt Shift Ctrl K on Windows. In a localised install, Spanish or Indonesian for example, the adjustment keeps its position in the Adjustments list even when its name is translated, so count down the list rather than hunt for the English words. If your copy has no Selective Color entry at all, the Hue/Saturation and Color Balance route reaches most of the same places with more work. The free options for anyone without a subscription are named on the free alternatives page: GIMP, Krita, Photopea in a browser and Paint.NET on Windows, plus the free tier of the app covered on Photoshop on a phone.

Where to go next

PHOTOSHOPPhotoshop, operation by operationPHOTOSHOPRemoving a background in PhotoshopHow to remove a background in PhotoshopPHOTOSHOPPhotoshop on a phoneWhat actually works