One of the joys of digital photography is being able to manipulate your images. i only started doing digital photography a year ago (when I got my digital camera). As soon as I started doing it, I started seeing the thing that you can easily do in Photoshop that are really difficult, if not impossible, to do in a darkroom. (I went to school for fine art photography, so I have spent my fair share of days in the darkroom).

One "fad" effect (and I say this, because i am sure that it will look dated in a few years just like the magenta backgrounds in senior pictures is from the 80's) is to desaturate an image (turn it to black and white, or very close to it) and then have a colored portion of it. As soon as I saw an image like that, I instantly wanted to learn how. I have hand colored images in the past, but the effect is nothing like what you can do digitally. So, I went online. I found tons of explanations of how to do it, and they were all very complicated. Matter of fact, after talking to a co-worker, they had about the same idea of how to do it as the tutorials did. It's a complicated mess of layers and masks and tons of time and effort.

Well, I am impatient, so I knew there had to be an easier way....and there is. Here is what you do:
Open the image that you are working on
Crate a new workspace and copy the file over to it (use a transparent background)
Completely desaturate one image (or desaturate it to about 95%) Or turn the image into a sepia image
Desaturate the second image about 10% (so that you don't have a glaring focal point)
Select, cut, and paste the First image over the second image
Take your handy dandy eraser tool, set it to a small size (this will depend on the image) and set it to about 75%
Erase the very outline of the "colored" portion.
Set the eraser tool to 100% and erase the the rest of the "colored" portion.
Viola! easy, isn't it?

Here's a final version example: