As an assignment, I have to take a color image of a lingerie model, change it to grayscale, and add color back to only the lingerie. Other than selecting the lingerie, and filling with an overlay of the color, I would like to know of any other ways to make this look more realistic. Thanks for your help.

after you've converted it back to rgb(or whatever) select the lingerie and use the layers option(cmd/ctrl-L) this may or may not work, just a thought

sorry, thats "levels", not layers. im just tired.

and it takes a bit to get the hang of it, but it's fairly intuitive

Thank you, I am going to try that today, I'll let you know how it turns out :-)

I've done this a couple of times, and what I do is mak a new layer, paint what it is I want colorized, then apply the layer at about a 60% transparency so it doesn't lose the detail and shading from the original image.

Let us know what mark we got on your assignment too hehe :P

I tried using Antevark's tip today. With much better sucess then my first attempt. I am posting my picture for all to critique. Although I am more satisfied with it than my previous results, I think this technique would look tons better if I had had a better picture to start with. Ah, and forgive the picture itself, our assignment was to find a lingerie model and recolor her lingerie. As always, any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks :-)

Another way if it is a color image. select the lingerie then inverese the selection (shift + ctrl +I) then go to image -> adjustments -> desaturate ( shift + ctrl + U ) this will change everything to black and white except the lingerie. This works great. If you want to change the color of the lingerie select it and use hue/saturation. Hope this helps.

i think the assignment was to learn how to recolour the image, not to just make all then other parts b&w