Delete/hide all pixels except those of a certain colour

[zella]

Hi guys,

I doing some portrait art and would love some help from you digital artists!

I am doing a black and white portrait and I know photoshop can help me I just cant figure it out myself.

What I want is to hide every pixel except those of a certain scale of grey, all the way from black to white. This will effectively allow me to do paint by numbers style portrait, where I can do all of one colour at a time.

Ideally I would love a slider, so I can slide through the grey scale and make the relevant parts of the image disappear as I go. I realise that I would want to keep a certain rage of colours visible rather than an exact colour, as that would tedious to try and represent that many ranges of grey in the real world.

I hope I explained that well enough.

Thanks in advance Z

 

[Crotale]

It greatly depends on the original and how much of an effect you seek. As one example, and probably not the best one, you can start off with the "Cutout" filter to get the basic flattening of colors so they are more easily manageable on an individual scale. From there, processes vary, as I said in my opening sentence. You can lasso by color or region and then put each color on a separate layer. The better method would be to use a layer mask for each color, which takes more time and effort, but pays off in greater flexibility. I would suggest layer masking for that reason.

Other than that, you can use the Live Trace or Live Paint feature in Illustrator to get started if you have access to that program.