Comic Relief

Tired of the same old holiday pictures? In five steps, give your photographs a bit of that Sin City effect.

1. Using Adobe Photoshop, create a duplicate layer (as shown in the figure). The effects that you add to the image will actually be to this new layer.

2. Go to the top menu, select 'Image' and and from the drop-down list, select 'Adjustment' and then 'Desaturate' the image to remove all colour.

3. Once the image is in black and white, go back to 'Adjustments', select 'Brightness/Contrast' and tweak them till you get that high contrast feel on the image.

4. Now select the eraser tool and wipe out the areas that you want back in the orginal colour. The size of the eraser tool can be adjusted simply by using the bracket '[' and ']' keys.

5. Once your image is ready, go back to the 'Layers' palette (Step 1) and 'Flatten' the image before 'Save As' a new .jpeg file to retain your original file.

For a desaturated, graphic novel-feel, choose images that have some colour element to them. Red works very well with black and white images.