Manually coloring a black and white photo in Photoshop. Coloring. Coloring black and white photos

step by step.

Why color black and white photos is a separate topic, but I still want to mention that we are talking about old photographs, which are usually found in every family album.

There are several ways to colorize b/w photos

Colorize photos yourself using Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop) or use another special photo editor.
Various online services automatically.
Order photo coloring to professionals .
Using pencils and paints.

Point 4 is not a joke at all; before the era of widespread computerization, they actually did this; they retouched photographs using special whitewash and coloring solutions. Now all this is in the past, all retouching of photographs and their coloring is done on a computer using a special program.

In order to colorize a photo online with some program, you just need to scan or photograph the original and put it into the online editor, do a couple of “magic” manipulations and voila you will have a black and white photo with colored spots. A pathetic semblance of a color photograph. Minimum costs, movements and understanding of what is actually happening. You need to have a good imagination to consider such a photograph to be in color.

You can go another way. Study the work of a serious photo editor, for example Adobe Photoshop, complete some art courses in drawing, and then masterpieces of fine art may appear in your family album, or they may not appear, because you still need time to colorize photographs and, as a rule, there is none. The result is a couple of clumsily colored photos, wasted time and an abandoned photo album.

In fact, if you are not comfortable with a computer and Adobe Photoshop is Photoshop for you, then the best thing to do is to order professional photo colorization. You just need to send a photo and for little money you will receive an updated photo in the family album. In this case, you will save a lot of time and effort on something that is more familiar to you, something that you yourself are a pro at. If you want a moment of optimization, it’s better to do well what you can do, and not do... it’s unclear what.

For those who still really want to try themselves as an artist, and in fact, this is the process of not just coloring, but realizing the depth of the color palette in the photo, I will show you a method of coloring in Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop).

First, open the photo Ctrl+O

Then click on the bottom right to create a new adjustment layer, color tone.

Check the tint box and use the sliders to select color, saturation and brightness.

First, approximate settings, later you can correct and configure more accurately.

Select the main color black and press Alt+Delete

Now click on the brush, select the main color white by pressing X

Now we paint the required area with a brush.

Colored

By the way, if you press Alt and hold the mouse while clicking on the black field of the mask, you can see what is painted white and how evenly

Then we repeat all the points over and over again and paint over the necessary areas.

Actually, the whole process comes down to competent selection of colors, and this is creativity and painstaking work.

Tip: The more colored areas you paint, the more full-color and natural the color rendition in the photo will be.

This is the easiest way to colorize photos in Adobe Photoshop.

Now the fun begins! Your task at this stage is to create areas demarcated by color, which does not yet exist! Whether it's the sky, grass, or a shirt, you must use your imagination and worldview to determine what objects each color will go with, and where they begin and end. Photoshop includes various selection methods that you can use during this step. These are Quick Selection Too, Lasso, Pen Tool, and others.

In this case, I'll select the sky using Quick Selection:

Step 3. Refining the selection

Once your preliminary selection is ready, you should use the Refine Edge tool, especially if you're dealing with tree branches or hair selections

For each image, the Smart Radius value should be selected individually; it depends on the complexity of the selection, the size of the image, etc. Please note in the pictures below I showed the selection state before and after applying the smart radius:

Step 4: Add Color to the Sky

To apply the tool's action, click OK, after which the “marching ants” will appear again in the working document window. It's time to add color! For this we will use Curves, as this adjustment allows us to edit each color channel individually, and thanks to the use of an adjustment layer, we can change the settings if necessary later at any time.

Each object in the image will require a different combination of Curves settings to give it color, for example the image below shows how I achieved cyan by editing the cyan, magenta and yellow channels:

This is what the former black and white sky looks like now:

Step 5: Add Color to the Rest of the Image

Now let's take care of the strip of forest on the horizon. I also selected it with a Quick Selection and then used the Refine Edge tool:

Again we use the “Curves” adjustment layer with the following settings; of course, in your case they may be different. Now the forest has turned green:

All that remains is to color the field. It is not necessary to create a new selection for it; just press Crtl+Shift+I to invert the selected area and then delete the excess (in my case, the top) selected area with any selection tool in the “Subtract from Selection” mode:

Then we give the field with hay a golden color:

This is what the image looks like now:

Step 6: General Color Correction

Adjust the overall saturation using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer:

And all that remains is to correct the overall tones and contrast again by adding a new “Curves” adjustment layer. Now let's change only the CMYK channel curve:

Well, that seems to be all. We admire the result:

So let's summarize this photo colorization method:

Converting an image's color mode to CMYK
Creating a selected area for painting
Add color to this area using Curves
General saturation correction
General brightness correction

Each of us has an old family album or just some old black and white photos at home. How do you like this idea - to take and take photos in color, fill them with paints?

In this tutorial we will look at a simple way to turn a black and white photo into color. For work, I took a black and white photo of a cheetah; during the lesson we will make this photo in color.

We open our black and white photo using Photoshop and first of all we see that the photo is locked - this can be seen by the lock on the layer. Unlock it so that you can work with it in the future by double-clicking with the left mouse button on this lock.

Now let's start coloring! First, let's color the background of the photo, make it green, to do this, select the layer of our photo by clicking on it once with the left mouse button and selecting "Layers" - "New Adjustment Layer" - "Color Balance" from the top menu of the panel.

After this manipulation, a pop-up window will appear with the adjustment layer settings, just click “OK”, leaving the default settings. After this, a panel with “sliders” will appear in the upper right corner, with which we will adjust the color of our background. Move the sliders and achieve the shade you need.

This way we got a second layer, on which our photo became completely green. Now we will color the cheetah, to do this, again select the layer with the black and white photo by clicking on it once with the left mouse button in the lower right corner of the program panel, and hide the layer with a green tint for a while by clicking once with the left mouse button on the “Eye” icon " near this layer.

Now we will select the cheetah, for this we will use the “Quick Selection” tool, select this tool in the left panel of the program and adjust its size. After this, let's start selecting the cheetah, holding the left mouse button and selecting the area we need; if we climbed over the edge or the selected area is too large, we can erase it by holding the "Alt" key and the left mouse button.

Having selected the cheetah, again select “Layers” - “New Adjustment Layer” - “Color Balance” in the top menu and, again, moving the sliders, we achieve the shade we need.

During coloring, in any case, the fields of the layers will overlap each other. To fix this (erase or add), you need to select the desired layer, left-click on it and use the eraser tool to erase the unnecessary edges of the layer. If, on the contrary, you need to finish painting the layer a little, then select the “brush” tool and paint over the errors with white. For soft transitions, select a “soft brush” and set the pressure mode to less than 100%.

And so, we now have 3 layers - this is a black and white photo, an image of a green tint and a selected cheetah in a yellow-brown tint. Now we substitute our green background for the cheetah, to do this, we will again turn on the visibility of our image with a green tint, select it (by left-clicking) and simply use the Eraser tool to erase the cheetah on it, thereby our layer with the colored cheetah will appear.

Carefully erase the edges of the cheetah (hairs, etc.) with a soft eraser, while you can adjust the pressure of the eraser in places where translucency of the layer is required. For convenience, do not forget to adjust the size of the eraser. In case of a blot (if the excess has been erased), touch up the area with a white brush.

Well, we color the cheetah’s eyes in the same way: select the layer with the original photo, select the eyes with the Quick Selection tool and create a new adjustment layer with the necessary color balance. I made them bright yellow).

In order to make the color balance brighter, in the tone adjustment panel (the same one with the sliders), select the “Highlights” label in the “Tone” section, as in the screenshot below and adjust the brightness with the sliders.

So, thanks to the simple manipulations of the flexible and powerful Photoshop program, we end up with a good result.

Then you have to constantly work with photographs and images. And, depending on the idea, the photo can be color or black and white.

Some projects require black and white photographs, others work better with color images, but in some cases, colorized black and white photographs are best.

In this tutorial, you'll learn two useful Adobe Photoshop techniques for adding color to grayscale photos. One method works well when you want to paint a specific area a uniform color, while the second, more subtle technique allows you to make the same area multi-colored. Both methods create a realistic color photograph from a black-and-white original while preserving the texture of the original image.

Step 1

Open a black and white image in Photoshop. I took as an example a photograph from the collection of the New York Public Library, posted for public use.

Step 2

Old photographs often show scratches and traces of dust, and although they were not removed in this tutorial, there are a few scratches that are too noticeable in this photo to get rid of. This can be done using the Clone Stamp tool (S), choosing a soft brush with a size of 60 px for our example.

Select the sample to clone by pressing Alt/Option and clicking somewhere in the least scratched area. Then click on the scratch to replace that area at the pixel level with the content of the selected sample. Do not share samples to avoid repeating patterns in the image texture.

Step 3

Now, having removed noticeable defects, you can begin painting. The first method involves selecting the area to be painted and adding color through Hue/Saturation adjustments. To select a dress whose outline contains many straight lines, the Polygonal Lasso tool is used here.

Note: By pressing the spacebar, you can drag the canvas as you like without interrupting the selection process, and Ctrl/Cmd combinations with the “-” or “+” signs will allow you to change the scale without turning on the Zoom tool.

Step 4

With the top part of the dress selected, move the canvas and press Shift to select the rest. With the Shift key the new area will be added to the selected one, and with the Alt/Option key it will be subtracted. With the object to be painted completely selected, you need to smooth out the outline of the selection by going to Selection > Refine Edge (Selection > Refine Edge) and setting the feather parameter to 1 px.

Then go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (Image > Correction > Hue/Saturation) and, checking the Colorize checkbox, select the desired color.
Note: Before you remove the selection, you can save it just in case by selecting Select > Save Selection (Selection > Save Selection). This will allow you to quickly load the selection when you need to add color.

Step 5

Repeat steps 3 and 4 for other, solid-colored parts of your photo (in this case, the chicken). Try different hue, saturation, and brightness ratios, but if you want to avoid a cartoony effect, don't go too high with the saturation level.

Step 6

To color the remaining areas, and in our case these are the chicken’s legs, the girl’s hair and the background, let’s use another technique, the main idea of which is to paint a heterogeneous object on a new layer and then select a suitable blending mode for the layers.
Select the legs, hair and background into a single area, even though they will have different colors.

Create a new layer by clicking on the icon with the Create a New Layer hint on the layers palette below. Then select a soft brush and paint the photo in the outline of the selected area, selecting the desired colors and adjusting the brush size. For convenience, you can temporarily reduce the opacity of the new layer.

Don't worry - this is not the end result yet!

Step 7

Expand the list of layer blending modes and select one of these for the colored layer: Multiply (Multiplication), Overlay (Overlay), Soft Light (Soft light), or Color (Color), which will depend on your image. Here the Soft Light mode is selected and the opacity is reduced to 44%.

Here you have a color photo! Using these two methods, you can make almost any black and white photograph more interesting and expressive.

One of the most familiar themes of sepia-to-color is The Wizard of Oz.

Translator's note: We are talking about the film "The Wizard of Oz", the film begins in sepia, and then colors appear, which was unique for the cinema of that time.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to tint a photo to sepia to create a color image.

Coloring a sepia or black and white photo can seem like a real challenge and can take time and patience, although it can be a lot easier than you think. Today I will show you the process of colorizing a photo in Adobe Photoshop.

Final result:

Source materials

The image I'm going to use in this tutorial is shown in the screenshot below:

Note: photo taken from http://www.loc.gov/

In my opinion, black and white photography is much easier to work with than sepia, so the first thing I did was convert the photo. This is just my personal preference and you don't have to, if you want and you like working in sepia, then work in sepia.

Translator's note: the author converted a sepia-toned photograph into a black and white image using correction Black and white(BlackandWhite).

1. Select the desired mode for the picture

Once you've uploaded the photo, you'll need to make sure the picture mode is set to RGB and not on the regime Grayscale(Grayscale), even if your image is monochrome or black and white. To check the mode, for this we go Image - Mode(Image >Mode), now make sure there is a checkmark next to the RGB mode.

2. We begin to color large fragments of the image

Step 1

Using a tool Quick selection(Quick Select tool), select the sky or any other large fragment of the image that is represented by one color shade.

Using a tool Quick selection(Quick Select tool), select a fragment of the image that is represented by one color shade, for example, the sky.

Step 2

Click the button Refine edge(Refine Edge).

Use the tool Refine edge(Refine Edge) to improve the boundaries of the selected area.

Step 3

In the tool settings window that appears Refine edge(Refine Edge), check the box Smart radius(Smart Radius). I changed the radius value to 5 px, but you can set a different radius value that best suits your image. I also increased the value Smooth(Smoth) up to 3 pixels to soften hard edges. You can also apply other settings to this tool to improve the boundaries of the selection. When you're ready, click the 'OK' button.

Select the correct value for Smart radius(Smart Radius), as well as for the option Smooth(Smooth).

Step 4

So, we have created an active selection, now click the button Add a New Adjustment Layer(Add New Adjustment Layer) at the bottom of the layers palette and in the window that appears, select the option Color(Solid Color).

Add an adjustment layer Color(Solid Color) through the bottom of the layers palette.

Step 5

Choose the color shade that you think best matches the sky in your image. For now, it doesn't matter whether you chose a color tone that's too bright or not, we'll fix that in a minute. Once you have chosen a color tone, click the 'OK' button and you will see the selection on the adjustment layer mask.

Choose a suitable color shade.

Step 6

Change the blending mode to Overlap(Overlay) and the selected color will look much better. If you are not satisfied with the selected color, then simply double-click on the blue rectangle next to the mask so that a window appears Color palettes(Color Picker), select the color shade that suits you best.

Change the blending mode to Overlap(Overlay).

Step 7

If you are satisfied with the result, you can restore the missing areas of the image or correct them using a soft black/white brush, which you can apply on the adjustment layer mask.

Correct any defects left after selection.