Monochrome with a touch of colour

As you may know, I have been sending in pictures for Leanne Cole’s ‘Monochrome Madness’ posts.

The suggestion is that for Christmas we should submit a photograph that is monochrome but with just a touch of colour.

I decided that I had better work out the best way to do this.

I use Corel Photo Paint for editing my photographs. I got a free copy of version 4 with my first colour printer and upgraded to a cut down version of 7 later. I don’t know what the current version number is but I am still happy with 7.

As an experiment I started with this (or rather the full size version).

Made a mask for the red heart with the magic wand tool and the brush tool. Then copied the masked part.

 

Removed the mask and converted the photograph to greyscale and then back to RGB colour. But of course they both look the same!

Then the magic bit!

I pasted the copied masked part which copied itself to just the right place and Yay!

I realised of course that not only would this not do for a ‘Christmassy’ picture but that people might not see the difference between this and an ordinary colour picture as they weren’t to know that one of the hearts was pink.

I also tried the one glass ball on the Christmas tree idea – ever so easy to mask a round ball! – using a photograph I took of my Chrsitmas tree last year.

But this won’t do either as it isn’t much of a colour photograph and makes a very muddy uninteresting monochrome one.

At least I know how to achieve the effect but I will have to think about what I could find to photograph if I am going to have an entry for that week.

What would you photograph?