How to Make a Colour Splash Photo

I have always admired other people's photos. How do they manage to compose the photo so perfectly? How do they get the lighting just right? And how on earth do they manage to edit those pictures so spectacularly, like that great effect where just one thing in a black and white photo is coloured? Obviously they must use some extra special editing programs that are incredibly difficult to use. Normal people couldn't do it. Or could they?

The other day my clever mother found out how to make these colour splash photos, and she taught me how to do it too. You only need a photo and some simple, free, online photo editing software. It's so easy that even I can do it! I'm going to show you how you can make these fantastic your photos, even if you know nothing about photo editing.

Step one is to find a photo to use. You can use one of your own, or, if you're like me and aren't any good at actually taking photos, you can use a free one. Most of my photos come from Morguefile, a creative commons photo resource website. I find that using a photo with a strong subject in a strong colour makes the photo more striking. This is the photo I've chosen.

Now go to Picmonkey. It's a free online photo editing program, and it has all the tools that you're going to need for this. If you need to play with the colours and brightness in your photo, now's the time to do it. Make sure that the part of the picture that's going to be coloured is just how you want it to look. Once you've started the next step it's difficult to go back and fix colouring. My picture already looks ok, so I'm ready to move on to the next step.

This next step is where the magic happens. Go to the 'Effects'. It's in the left sidebar, and looks like a bubbling flask. Scroll down and click on the black and white effect. Now your whole picture should be black and white. Do not click on apply. You should see a floating window with slider bars sitting near your picture. This is the paintbox, and it's going to help you make your amazing photo.

Make sure that the 'original' button is clicked on the paintbox. Hover your mouse over the picture. It should be a little round circle. Click and drag across the part of the picture that you want to colour. The black and white effect will disappear. Use your paintbrush to colour the subject of your picture. This might take a while, and can be a little fiddly. If you make a mistake, just click 'Effect' on the paintbox and rub over the mistake and it'll go away.

Once you're sure that you've got the picture right, click on 'apply'. And there you have it, your black and white picture with a splash of colour. Isn't it awesome looking? And you didn't need anything special to make this effect.

If you're feeling like the black and white is too harsh, you can use the slider bar in the left sidebar, where you clicked on the black and white effect, to fade the black and white, like I've done in this picture. This lets a little colour into the picture, but keeps everything except the painted area very muted.

Isn't my mum clever to know how to do this? And now you can do it too. Why not give it a try? Then leave me a link in the comments so I can go and see your masterpiece. I'd love to see what you come up with.