Once upon a time, if you wanted to get the Kim Anderson effect, you had to do it in the darkroom with various color filters, or with the artist's palette and special paint designed for photos. Digital image manipulation has dramatically changed the face of photography by moving the darkroom into the computer, allowing virtually anyone to create stunning special effects with very little effort.

Let's get started
Apart from an image to hand color, you're going to need an image editing program. There are quite a few available with the most popular being Adobe Photoshop. As awesome as Photoshop is, it comes at a pretty high price, and not everyone can afford that price. Paint Shop Pro is one of the more cost-minded alternatives to Photoshop. For the seriously budget-minded, GIMP is a free, open-source image editor comparable to Photoshop. I have Photoshop, so that's what I'll be using for this article.

First, you'll want to choose an image to hand color. Once you have the image loaded into your photo editor, make a back-up of the image in PSD format, like shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Make a back-up of the original image. Click picture for a larger image.

This is a Photoshop format that's uncompressed and doesn't require flattening, or layer merging. The file will be rather large, but this is just our working image and can be deleted once the project is complete. This PSD file is the image that we'll actually be editing, leaving the original image in tact.

Next, we want to create a duplicate layer of this image. Pressing the right-hand arrow in the layer window will open the layer menu like in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Create a duplicate layer of the image. Click picture for a larger image.

Select Duplicate Layer from the menu. You can now remove/delete the Background layer. Duplicating the Background layer will give you a higher degree of control and editing options for the image than if you just left the Background layer.

Removing the color
In order to make the hand-coloring stand out, we'll need to convert the image to Grayscale. From the menu, select Image->Mode->Grayscale, like in Figure C, to convert the image to Grayscale.

FIGURE C

Converting your image to Grayscale will remove all color. Click picture for a larger image.