Colorization
by redViper
Do you have a black and white photo, that you
want to see come to life with color? Adobe Photoshop makes
it easy for that to happen. In this tutorial, we will go
through the basic steps in making your black and white
photo, POP! With color!
-
The first thing you must do
is open up your black and white photo in photoshop. If
your taking an already colored photo and want to make it
black and white, go to Image | Adjustments | Desaturate.
That makes your colored photo, black and white. If your
photo is already black and white, skip this step.

[ This is
what our photo looks like in B&W ]
-
Now, take a mental note of
what colors you want to use. Brown's and Green's for the
tree, blue for the pants .. etc;. Create a new layer, and
pick your first color. I'm going to pick blue, for the
people's pants. I picked this blue
#0066FF
Color in the pants with this color. Now you may be
thinking, this is a mess! But no, the magic comes soon.
Fill in each of the people's pants, until you are happy.

[ Blue in
the jeans ]
-
Once you are done that, on
the Layers Palette, under the drop down box, click 'Soft
Light'. And there you go! Your subjects now have some
pants made of color. If you think that color is too
bright, you can always put down the opacity. (also on the
layers palette menu) Play around with it, and you should
be happy.

[ Change the
layers option to Soft Light, to start the magic ]
-
And that is the basic jist
of what you have to do. A suggestion would be to have each
different color you use, on a separate layer. It just
helps if you want to go back and edit it later.
The finished product should
look like this:

[ Left: Our
product | Right: The original ]
Now see how easy that was? In
a matter of 15 minutes, we took a black and white photo, and
made it pop with some color. Although it doesn't look
extremely realistic, it's still close to it. This is amazing
if you have old b & w photos that you want to spruce up.
|