The Eyes Have It

Let me show you how to selectively filter an image to produce a stunning black & white photo with the eye retaining it's color (as shown above). This is a beautiful effect that is very easy to accomplish in Adobe Fireworks (or photoshop)!

For this tutorial, click the image below and save it to your computer, or copy the image and paste it in a new Fireworks (or photoshop) project.




There are only a few steps required, using the Polygon Lasso Tool (show below) to select the portion of the eye you wish to work with. Begin tracing out the iris, staying as close to the edge as possible. If you need to, you can zoom in to 300% to get a better trace.





To use this tool, just click where you want to start selecting the outline of the iris (above), then move to another point, continuing until you've gone around the entire iris. When you have made the full circle, the selection will be closed and should look something like this:



The next step will be to invert the selection. As you might have guessed, the eye is to stay in-color, so we need to select everything EXCEPT the eye! To invert the selection, type CTRL+SHIFT+I. (hold down control and shift keys and press the "i" key once). The selection will now be inverted...

To remove the color from the selected image, you'll want to use the Hue/Saturation Filter found on the Filters Menu as shown below:



This brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box (as seen below). Make sure the Colorize check box is checked and slide the Saturation slider all the way to the left, or just type a zero in the box:

Click OK and you're done! The image is now black & white, except for the iris, which remains in color! This effect looks great for all eye colors! The final image:

The pixels of this digital photo were captured on a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, also known as the Canon 400D. Settings were ISO 200 with an F5 aperture and a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second. I was using a Canon "Nifty-Fifty" lens with a Canon EF II 12mm Extension Tube bringing this image close to 1:4 macro.