Selective color may be old hat to many, but I have a few in my collection that I really like. For me, the technique seems to work particularly well when the selective color could be natural to the scene. Here are a couple of examples of that.
The diner floor was actually red, black and white and the stool seats were red - I just whitened the white tiles, darkened the black ones, and increased the saturation on the red ones. The vinyl of the booth seats was creamy white, but removing the yellow tones looked very natural.
Although the pergola of this Southwestern patio was white, the stucco wall was brown and the ristra (string of chilis) was red, of course. My sister who lives in New Mexico loved the design and subject, but she wanted a black and white image for her room. When I converted to bw, I lost the ristra. Then I thought, "the stucco could as well have been gray as brown" - so I tried selective color, and the ristra came right back :) Now I actually prefer this version to the color as the red ristra doesn't show that well against the warm brown tones, either.
