For anyone who doesn’t trek through the Photoshop section of the forum, I have released a free script that allows you to separate color from an image onto it’s own layer, non-destructively.
For more details check out the thread in the Photoshop section below:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=14&t=845783
I can’t think of a project that I need this for right now, but I can bet it will be very handy in the future. Thank you!
Thank you all for your comments. It’s cheered me up from a lame week.
Feedback from anyone who has used the script is appreciated as well.
Also, a nice use for the script is in Photo-Retouching, as you can more easily fix blemishes on the black and white image, and then if need be, seeing now how simple the overlaying color really is, quickly smooth the color over.
Wow man, that’s amazing. Very useful tool.
Just wondering, what’s the process you make to separate them?
This would be very nice to have in AE btw 
You can check the release thread on it for more information about how it works and feel free to ask me anything about it. Also, if you expand the “action script” in Photoshop you can play through the process step by step. The technique should be repeatable for video purposes but I have not yet attempted this.
Your in the same ballpark Chritter. And correct me if I’m wrong, but what your suggesting is painting atop a black and white layer, using a color blended layer? What this script does, is actually allow you to take a flattened color image, a color photograph for example, and actually separate the color from the flat image onto it’s own separate layer.
That will work, but the color layer would be less useful for studying images (breaking them down into simpler to understand pieces), which is the primary intent of this tool. But yes, that would be functionally fine for regular working (i.e. re-touching) purposes, but is still minimum a 4 step process that would benefit from automation if needed often. Otherwise, using only 2 steps, your layers will look very odd visually when working on them in this way, as your shading layer would now be a mix of color and black and white which is hard visually to navigate and blend together properly, and your separate color layer will contain unused shading information that will start to look quite odd as you modify it substantially without regard to it’s unused shading.
