Desaturated Dandelions?

A pesky weed or a beautiful flower? I'm sure with the sleet and snow we had today, many are looking forward to the weather which brings these golden wonders to every one's lawn. Regardless, let's talk about a new term called desaturation. This is a large word for basically removing color from your picture.

Technically, for those who really want to know, it causes the RGB colorspace (Red, Green, and Blue hues) toward grayscale which makes your image appear in various shades of gray. This isn't true grayscale however, because some of the shadows and tones could appear lighter or darker depending upon the conversion and the application used. Some generically set the desaturation levels while others allow for modification causing slight differences.

Let's take a look at a picture of a patch of four dandelion's (shown above) that I desaturated. We know that dandelion's have very yellow heads, but in this picture, everything appears in shades of gray. It gives a pretty cool effect on specific types of pictures.

Now, let's add back some color. But to be unique, let's add color back to only ONE of the four dandelion heads! To do this, we're going to pick a color (yellow would make sense but if you wanted something different - go for it) and paint over one of the heads.

Take a look at this second picture to see the difference. After I selected a decent yellow, I modified the fill and opacity to get the right look and feel. We'll be discussion these two new words shortly in another post so don't worry about them now. Basically it allows us to make the yellow not so rich or vibrant but keeping it light and allowing all the flower's features to come through the yellow.

Think of it this way. You have a piece of newspaper and you are painting over a picture printed on the main page. Now you really like the picture so you use LESS paint and pressure (fill/opacity) to paint on the picture so you can still see it even though you're applying color.

This allows for some neat pictures. Try desaturating some of your own and see what types of combinations you can come up with. If you want to share, send me one of yours and we'll discuss it.