I didn’t like the color and lighting of the background, so I burnt it with a brush, then used the sponge tool in Photoshop to completely desaturate it to the point where only the Pipefish was still in full color and everything else was grey tones.

Next, I went into Color Efex Pro to colorize the entire image using an orange tone picked off the subject and a low opacity. This gives the image the overal same tone, while preserving the ‘pop’ in the subject. Sharpened in Photoshop with an unsharp mask, and colors are boosted with the vibrancy slider in Aperture.