Disney's Beauty & the Beast Icon Tutorial
(Made with PS Elements 3.0)


This takes a basic knowledge of PS. I hope everything's located at the right place :s

This technique can be inversed so the picture is in colour but there are hits of black and white.

1. Start with a picture, any picture. Make sure that there's a bright colour you can work with somewhere in the picture. You can sharpen it before you start.

2. Go to your lasso tool. Make sure "Add to selection" is selected, or the second button from the left.

3. Zoom in. Outline the part of the image which you want to keep colourized. Keep in mind that if the colour part is against white (like the second example icon, on the man's shirt) or black, you can be a little sloppy because it'll stay white anyway.

4. Now go Shift+Ctrl+I or Select > Inverse.

Now do EITHER 5 OR 6:

5. Right-click the selection. Select Layer via Copy.

-or-

6. Do Ctrl+C (or Edit > Copy) and then Ctrl+V (or Edit > Paste)

7. Now your new layer is everything that's going to become grayscale. Call that one Black and White or something.

8. Enhance > Adjust Color > Remove Color

9. Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Levels. I consider this one of my most important tips. Always adjust levels to bring out the contrast. A black-and-white picture needs a different amount of darkness and lightness than a colour picture, in order to look well-defined.

10. As a final touch, I like to blur the background. I use my blur tool on a soft round brush at 50-75% opacity and just go over the background.

11. You now can add text and/or a border.

I'm comfortable enough with this that instead of making a new layer (like in steps 5 and 6), I just remove the colour from my original base layer. Also, remember that if you missed a spot when selecting your colour, you can go back and adjust it because it's on Add to Selection.

Also keep in mind that if you hit Ctrl+U and adjust your saturation, you can make the colour pop out more.