I took this photo last year when I was still noobing it out with my new Nikon and kit lens. That's not to say that I'm "pro" now, but I think I know my camera a little bit better than before (and I might have used my 35mm prime in portrait orientation this time around). I liked the texture of the statue, as well as the lichen patches that had formed on it which gave it a nice splash of colour. When I looked at the picture later on my computer the features that I liked were lost in the background distraction of green leaves. Naturally I wanted to make the photo black & white but doing this would obviously remove the lichen patches, hence my decision to use selective colour.
It was just a case of overlaying the original colour image on top of a black & white version in Photoshop, then erasing everything from the colour image except the statue.
I then played with the blending mode of the colour layer and chose pin light. This had the effect of turning the lichen a bit more orangey-red instead of the original yellow tone, but it also added some definition to the lichen edges, as well as making it look less like a quick hack job using hue and colorization adjustments.
A few more adjustments with contrast and brightness to bring out more definition and a quick blur of the sides (to soften the spiky tree in the foreground which really distracted my eye) and it's done.
I suppose it's one way to rescue an image that's missing a certain something (or has too many distracting subjects), but I don't know if I'd use the effect often.
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