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!

1. 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 ]

2. 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 ]

3. 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 ]

4. 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.

Download PSD File