How would I make my background images black and white, while keeping my main imagine in color? I have a pic of a motorcycle and I would like to keep the vibrant colors of the bike on the pic, while making everything else black and white or a gray tone.

You could place the background and foreground images on separate layers, raising foreground layer above the background layer, then desaturate the background layer to black and white.

Yes, or you can select the bike with the paths tool, turn that into a selection, and select/invert
That inverts the selection and selects all but the bike
then go to - Color/desaturate
That will desaturate everything but the bike. =)

There are many ways to do things in Gimp.

LOL. Rod, ya ninja posted me, but I'm leaving my post because mine has a pretty picture with it.

Another way you can do it is use the Paths tool to select around your motorcycle, then Path to selection, invert the selection (Ctrl + I), Colors > Desaturate. I chose the luminosity setting in desaturate for this one.

lol - sorry O
That is a very pretty picture though. =)

Yeah, I see how sorry you are.

Glad you like my picture.

It's a technique that's sometimes known as selective desaturation



I can't remember exactly how I did it but it's possible I used the Hue-Saturation dialog, reducing the saturation of all the colours except red (works best if the colour of your subject doesn't exist in the background)

Paynekj, I went into hue and saturation and selected each color (have to go back each time to H&S) except red and slid the Saturation slider all the way to the left (-100). It desaturated all of the colors (except red). When I was finished with that part of it there were some left-over reds that I selected loosely around using the lasso tool and in some places the rectangle select tool (no need to worry about the bg as it's already desaturated), then went back to H&S and selected red and desaturated those.

I like your method. GIMP has so many cool ways to do things.

Here is my result.


This is after just desaturating all colors except red ... it shows the leftover reds. As you can see, there are two places where they touch the big rose; those places may be better done with the paths tool, but I zoomed in and used the lasso tool.

Very nice O. =)