I tried to do the body skull from Philippe Halsman’s portrait of Salvador Dali, but I ended up overlooking a few positioning details, namely the arm along the jaw line and the arms that form the eyes. I didn’t want to let it go to waste though since I spent so much time on it, so I’m putting it up anyway. Consider this “attempt 1″ because I plan to eventually do this again.

Color grading is the process of altering an image’s color. You can use it to achieve a more natural look or something surreal. While it can usually be done in a few simple steps, I’m going to go over a process I used to selectively color specific portions of an image rather than having the effect apply to an entire picture. There’s a countless number of ways to handle color grading and this is just to help people get an idea of how to start off. The process I go through myself typically changes depending on the needs of the image and so this guide shouldn’t be taken as a “definitive” answer for color grading.

In the tutorial below, just click on the example photos to enlarge them.

This is Xavier. I had two goals in mind when composing this image. I wanted to keep the colors in the background cool while Xavier’s skin tones stayed slightly warmer. Below is the entire process, step by step.

Because I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my work, I tend to use Lightroom’s temperature and tint tools to begin the editing process of anything I shoot. Lightroom’s controls make the entire editing process laughably simple. If you’re working in Photoshop, you can also use Photoshop’s Camera Raw tool (assuming you’re shooting in RAW format) or the curves tool to achieve similar effects. In the photo above, I created two scenes, one using a temperature of 4.6k (warm, photo right) and the other using a temperature of 3.7k (cool, photo left). If you look closely at both the background and Xavier, you’ll notice that in addition to the background taking on slightly different hues, Xavier’s skin tones changed as well. This is something I wanted to avoid, and for this reason I’ve decided to selectively color the image.

To start, I’ll begin by importing both the cool and warm image into Photoshop for more detailed editing.

Layer the warm image on top of the cool image on a single canvas in Photoshop. From there, turn on the quick mask and use the brush tool (brush settings 50% hardness, 100% opacity) to paint over portions of the image. In my case, I chose to paint over Xavier’s whole body since this is the portion of the image I want to selectively color.

When you’re done with that, remove the quick mask and the parts of the image that you did not paint over will automatically become selected. From this point, just hit the delete key to remove this part of the image. I now have Xavier’s body from the warm image floating on top of the background of the cool image. Cool background, warm skin tones. I’m halfway done.

In the next step, you may or may not want to change the blend mode of the image. I chose to set the blend mode to soft light in order to bring out the shadows and highlights over Xavier’s body. I also noticed one slight issue; the background was annoyingly blue. It was just too bright and clashed with the tones of the image.

To remedy this, we can slightly desaturate the background.

Photoshop’s hue/saturation tool has two options for desaturating a photograph. It can desaturate the whole image (example left) or can be applied to specific colors (red, blue, green, yellow, etc.). In order to avoid having the tool mess up the work I did on Xavier’s skin tones, I chose to desaturate only the blue color spectrum (example right). One thing to keep in mind is that the reds in a photograph are typically associated with human skin and therefore have the most noticeable effect on people when you are desaturating an image.

My final step in the editing process was to do skin work and some last minute touches. A couple of pimples here and there. Some bags under the eyes. The dodge and burn tool was also used to bring attention to some shadows on Xavier’s clothing. And of course, I had to remove the background flash that got caught in the photograph.

And below is another example from the same set of photos. Similar editing process, but I chose to keep the skin tones slightly warmer.