Feature: Leaving a Touch of Color in an image is even easier
Motivation: We use Corel PaintShop Pro to leave Touches of Color

Color images are enhanced by leaving just a Touch of Color; and it is pretty easy to do with just masking tools and the colorize option. In the screenshot above we show the magic ingredients in action. You take a picture and isolate with the Freehand Mask Tool just the areas that you want the the color to remain on. You then choose Selection | Invert to reverse the mask. What this does is protect the masked areas while leaving the majority of the image to be colorized.

In PaintShop Pro that command is Adjust | Hue Saturation | Colorize. We have chosen to go with a yellow Hue and very low Saturation setting. This gives the hint of a sepia toning to the image .The final image is below:

Note we made a number of small adjustments to the "touch of color" image. First, we isolated the two runners in color using the Freehand Masking tool. Next we used the Saturate Desaturate tool from the toolbox to increase the saturation of the two runners kept in color. Finally we used the Lighten Darken tool to increase the darkness of the two "color" runners.

Duotone variation

In this next example, the same order of tricks have been followed:
1)Mask off the areas you want to retain the color of;
2)Invert the selection;
3)Colorize the rest of the image.
In the last step I have really increased the Saturation value in the Colorize dialog to give a distinct sepia toning. I have also moved the Hue value closer to a dark red for the same reason. But the image looked too edgy. So one of the very nice features of Corel PaintShop Pro is its edge preserving smooth tool. This tool recognizes edge boundaries, preserves them while smoothing the rest of the image area. Choose Adjust | Add/Remove Noise | Edge Preserving Smooth and add to taste.

Problem - the preserved colors were still too loud. So choosing the Saturate/Desaturate tool from the toolbar and setting Hardness at 30% and Opacity at 35%, and then right clicking to desaturate, I was able to moderate the colors like so:

And thus we have suggestions of a colorful duotone. The border(Image | Add Borders), uses the color from the pole vaulter shirt and is bottom and right side loaded in size.

Tritone Theme

Well if we can approximate a Duotone with Colorize why not try a Tritone as well. You have to be lucky and have the right combination of colors in the original image. Fortunately, the image of the American runner doing a very wet victory lap provided opportunity. Colorful Flags always provide good motive - and so with PaintShop Pro as means, we were off to the races so to speak.

As always we masked off the area of the image where color was to be retained using the Freehand Masking tool. Then inverted the selection or mask using the Select | Invert command. This means the next step, colorizing, will be applied to all of the image except where we want to retain color. The Image already had a bluish cast because of the rainy weather; but we made it more uniform with a Adjust | Hue Saturation | Colorize and setting at a relatively high 64% saturation. Finally we did a bit of touch ups with the Saturate Desaturate tool. The colors look washed away by the cooling rain and all in a tri-hues or tones.

So to summarize, it is very easy in color photography to leave just a hint of color - its best to leave only one; but as you can see from the images above multi-colors can be effective too.