Eyesare naturally attracted to color - it's a proven fact. Think about it: which catches your eye first, a faded light blue 1993 Ford Escort, or a bright racing red 2004 Ford Focus? Thought so...

You can use this fact to your advantage. I've seen it used in numerous magazine advertisments, on TV commercials, in movies and in TV shows.

Start with your source image, and do all of your normal corrections: Levels, color balance, sharpening, etc., then press + to make a duplicate of this layer. I'm using this scene of parade watchers in Paris:

Click the original Background Layer and create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer by clicking the little icon at the bottom of the layers palette.

I just desaturated the image a bit by pulling the slider to the left and clicked the "Colorize" box to add just a hint of blue. I also upped the Lightness a bit, but you can use whatever settings you like to make your image look like you want:

Now click on the Background Copy layer to make it active, and choose your favorite selection tool: Quick Mask , one of the Marquee tools , or the Extract filter. I'm using Extract here because it works well for this image; you can use whichever you're most comfortable with to remove all the parts of your image that you don't want to have color.

I wound up with a layer like this:

Now it's just a simple matter of adding whatever other elements you want:

In this case, I added a bit of text and a logo to complete the image: