Can someone please clarify the desaturation rules for basic editing? I remember seeing a shot that had selectively desaturated, leaving just blue and I think it was explained that under basic rules that was ok. But when I looked up the rule page it said no selections.
Is there a legal way of doing it?
yes, it is legal, so long as the tools you use are applied to every pixel in the image.
So when you use the hue/sat or replace color tool and start desaturating specific colors, you're making a change the entire image (not really "selecting"), and if you can get a successful result from that it is legal.
But once you start sectioning off parts of the image and desat'ing specific areas, that is illegal under basic.
Can someone please clarify the desaturation rules for basic editing? I remember seeing a shot that had selectively desaturated, leaving just blue and I think it was explained that under basic rules that was ok. But when I looked up the rule page it said no selections.
Is there a legal way of doing it?
You can desat the entire image and then resat the entire color channel in an image (blue or red, etc), but no selections.
So you have to take that into account before taking the photo to insure the only say "blue" you want is your subject.
They probably did it by opening a hue/saturation adjustment layer and taking all the colors channels down to 0 saturation except the color channel they wanted to remain in the photo. AS long as you don't make any selections and apply to the whole photo you should be ok.
