masktutorial

Colorizing a Black and White Photo

Written by Amy McDow
www.guinnillustrated.com

There are a number of ways that you can achieve this technique and many different programs
you can use. Personally, I use Photoshop 7.0 and this tutorial will show you how I chose to
handle this effect. I am only focusing on this process – please know that other adjustments
may need to be made in addition to this for you to complete your photo alteration (i.e. levels,
curves, gradient map, sharpening, dodging, etc).

1. Select a color picture and open it in Photoshop. (Easy enough, right!) For this
tutorial, I selected a shot of my daughter at the beach. I will choose to color her bathing suit
and hat, leaving everything else in the photo black and white.

2. Make sure your Layers Window is open, so you can see what you are doing as we
continue. You will then duplicate your background layer. Go to the layer tab, select
duplicate layer and feel free to rename it if you wish.

5. Now you are ready to get creative! You will use your eraser to remove the
black and white photo and show the color layer below. You can also use your
paintbrush to reapply the black and white layer. Of course, all of the skills you
learned with your brushes and other tools can be used here. You can change the
opacity of the brushes. You could adjust the saturation of the first layer (color) to
make the colorization subtler. You can even use custom brushes to create
interesting effects on the photo.

6. I start erasing with a large brush size over the larger areas to be changed.
When I need to focus on smaller areas or around edges, I decrease the brush size.

7. You may also need to enlarge the picture viewing size so that you can handle
the detail work with more accuracy. When you make a mistake with your eraser, you
can fix it with “undo” and start that portion over, or you can simply select your brush
and reapply the black and white coverage.

Above: After erasing too much of the black and white, I reapplied the 2nd layer with
my brush.

8. Once you are happy with your final image…save it and be proud! That wasn’
t nearly as difficult as you thought it would be, was it???