Brush of color

Difficulty: Beginners/intermediate Photoshop

Ever wonder how some layouts and graphics have those bright spots of color, or black and white images with some color?
This style doesn't all ways come out the same, because it involves different brush sizes and alot of randomness =)

Turn this:	Into this:

The Start:

We will be using the following tools for this tutorial. which is the brush tool, which is the eraser tool and the paint bucket which looks like this . Simple and nothing too complicated. The image I'm using was to be a silentatmosphere layout, anyway it features Johnny Knoxville. As for the double of him in this piece I'll go into that technique in another tutorial. Back to the tutorial, make sure you have the image you want to edit ready and opened in photoshop. If you want to produce the same effect as that above please desaturated your image by going to Image > adjustments> desaturated or hit these keys Shift+Ctrl+U. Once thats done we will start with the tutorial.

Step 1: make it soft

This step was done by covering the entire picture white with the paint bucket with the color white (FFFFFF). To do this please create a new layer and paint that layer white. With the new layer white change the blending mode from normal to lighten (you can find this tab on the layers window, the drop down list with the default name set to normal). When you change the blending mode, because your using the color white there will be no change, thats where the eraser tool comes in, use the soft edge brush depending on your image size make the brush's size fairly large and randomly erase most of the white to kinda match the image on the side, or create your very own look. I use soft edge brush at the size 300 and randomly erased some parts of the white so that I can still view the picture and create a softer dreamy look.

Step 2:add the color

Now its time to add the color, for this example I used #960775 which looks like this . I repeated the very same steps as above just without the white this time. To achieve this look please make a new layer a move the new layer below the white (this can be done by clicking on the new layer and dragging it under the white). Now with the white layer on the top go back to the new layer and fill your picture with whatever color you want, or you can use #960775 like me. Following the same idea as the step above I filled the new layer with #960775 and randomly erased the image till I came up with a look that I liked. If your asking as to why I kept the white on top, its because it brightens the pink and because its random on both layers certain parts of the pink will lighten while others won't, you can put the white layer on the bottom to see the difference yourself. This preview to the left is the pink's blending mode is set to normal to get an idea of how it looked before I changed the blending mode to Lighten.

Finished:

Here is the finishing product of this tutorial, the pink layer was set to lighten adding color to this image. Yuor welcome to do this as many times as you like with as many colors you think look good together. For this tutorial only two were used, white for a softer look, and pink just for some color. If you want another style of color spots try the example below for an idea on how to do it.

Other results

Like this look instead? well this one was done with just one layer and the color pink #960775 I used a 200 soft edge brush much like the 300px soft edge , but instead of using the eraser I used the brush instead. Remember this preview is desaturated (black and white) you can repeat that same step or you can leave your image as is. With the color pink and my 200px soft edge brush I made four random spots, and set the blending mode to lighten. Thats it, done.