Affinity Photo - Colouring Black and White Images

hi it's chris p williams here i hope you're well in this tutorial we're going to be looking at coloring a black and white image with infinity photo and before we start i just want you to click on the white circle in the color palette i then want you to select a color just by left clicking in this rectangular palette i selected blue and now i want you to press d on your keyboard now you can see with mine they've now returned to black and white and black and white is a default state if yours doesn't turn back to black and white don't worry we just need to set up a shortcut and to do that we just need to go to edit preferences keyboard shortcuts file drop down scroll all the way down to the bottom and select miscellaneous and we're looking at this set fill to black and white if this box is empty just left click and type d and then press close we've now created a shortcut so we left click now on any color in our color palette you can see that's turned blue by pressing d it returns to our default state of black and white and this is going to be very useful we start editing masks later on ok we can now start looking at adding some color to this picture of john and first thing we need to do is to make sure the image is truly black and white i.e it's gray scale the reason for this is a lot of black and white images have got tones or little subtle tones that we can't quite see and to get rid of these we're going to use a hue saturation and luminosity adjustment layer so go into our layers palette at the bottom we see this little white and black circle labeled adjustments just left click on that and scroll up to hsl which is abbreviation for hue saturation and luminosity and we're only interested in this saturation shift slider so left click on the node in the middle and drag it to the left and this removes any color tones in our image so we can now click on the little star in the top right corner of the tool to close it and if we right click on the hsl adjustment layer to just press right click and scroll down to merge down we can bake that effect into our photograph and this is a starting basis of coloring the photo right the next step we need to do is to identify what colors we're going to be using in our image and in this case we've got the blue of john's shirt i might make the hat and a waistcoat the same color so i might use a brown we've got a background we've got skin and we've got john's eyes so let's start with selecting a color to color the hat and waistcoat so just double click on the white colored circle on our color palette using the hue slider i'm going to drag it to an orange tone and from there i can select a suitable brown color if you look at this little tile and top right corner that indicates the color that we're actually selecting and once we found the color we're happy with we can just press close and you can see now that the white circle has turned brown okay we now need to apply this color to our image and to do this we're going to use a shape tool if we go to the toolbar on the left and scroll down to this little rectangle tool and just left click and hold you can see here we've got a list of different shapes not all shapes have to be rectangular but in this case we do need a rectangle tool so it's going to scroll up to the rectangle tool and let go with my mouse and that's now selected if i left click in the top left corner of my image just outside the image itself left click and hold and then drag down to the bottom right corner now our image has disappeared and that's because this is a solid color so we need to change the blend mode and to do this we're going to go to this drop down menu currently labeled normal if we left click on the little arrow we get a selection of blend modes now don't worry too much about these blend modes i've done tutorials on my channel about all of these the only one we're interested in now is the soft light so just left click on soft light and we can see now that the photograph of john has reappeared you can also see that the brown color has been applied to the whole of a photograph and that's not what we want we only want to apply it to the waistcoat and the hat to do this we need to make a selection of the waistcoat and hat and before i proceed i'm going to rename my rectangle layer to hat and we can turn this off for the time being so returning to our background layer by left clicking the background layer you can see it's now highlighted blue we can now start making a selection of the hat and waistcoat we're going to use the selection brush tool to make this selection it's a fourth tool down on the left or you can press w on the keyboard and you can see now we've got this little circular brush if we use our left and right square brackets we can alter the size of this brush the right square bracket increases the size and the left square bracket decreases so i'm going to press the right square bracket to increase that brush size slightly and i'm going to start painting over john's hat you can see here we've selected an area we didn't intend to so if you press alt and left click that would deselect that area i missed this little corner on john's hat so i'm going to let go of the old key and just left click to select and if we press ctrl and using the scroll wheel on our mouse we can zoom in so press ctrl and scroll you can see this area has been selected incorrectly so i'm going to reduce my brush size using the left square bracket press alt and delete that area of selection now if i press the space bar you can see the cursor turns into a hand and keeping my finger on the spacebar i can now left click and drag around my image i can drag up down left right you can see here is a little bit of john's hat we've missed so making sure we're not pressing alt key this time just a left key on our mouse we can select that area of hat and again i'm going to press the spacebar and just drag over the image check it for little errors you can see here we've missed a rim of hat so just left click and drag to add that press the spacebar a little bit of hat missing here so again just drag to include that and press ctrl and 0 on our keyboard to zoom out we can now start adding our waistcoat so just left click over the waistcoat and drag to include that in our selection again i've added a bit of shirt in error so we press alt and drag over the area shirt you can see it's removed from our selection a good tip here is to drag left click and let go left click and let go just basically selecting small areas at a time that just allows you to use the control in zed on your keyboard which is undo so if we do make a little error press control and z and return back to a previous state and that's looking good to me and now we can look at the other side of the waistcoat so just left click and drag so if i zoom in on his shoulder or john press your alt key left click and drag just to remove that bit of background so ctrl and zero to zoom out so once you've got a rough selection we can click on the refine button in the top toolbar what i like to do is go to the preview drop down left click and select white matte and that gives me a better idea of what i've actually selected and you can see here there's little areas that have been added to my selection which i don't want so to remove those i'm going to go to click on the background button so you can see here we've got matte foreground and background and i'm going to increase my brush size slightly i'm just going to paint over those patches just to remove them i think that's looking good to me whilst i'm here i'm also going to feather the selection by clicking on the feather slider and just moving it to the right around three should do the job and once we're happy we can just press apply now you can spend a little bit more time on that selection just refining it and making it as best you can but in my case i'm going to load a selection i made earlier and we can move on to the next stage right the next thing we need to do is to apply this selection as a mask to our hat layer so let's turn our hat layer back on just by rechecking the check box left clicking on the brown rectangle you can see that layers now turn blue indicating that layer is selected now because we selected the hat layer and it is a solid color any changes we make to the color tab will affect that color for instance if i now select blue you can see the layer turns blue and that's not what we want so i'm going to press ctrl and z now to undo that it's important here that we switch to our brush tool so i'm going to select the brush tool which is the 10th icon down on the left toolbar now if you press d on our keyboard you can see our colors return to default but the brown is remain brown okay we're now going to add a mask to this layer using this selection and to do this we're going to go to our layers palette and we're going to click on a little white box with the black circle so just left click and that creates a mask you can see here we've got a mask next to our hat layer and also the colors now being restricted to the waistcoat and the hat we selected earlier so we press ctrl and d to remove the marching ants we can see we've applied our first color to our image okay we can now move on to the shirt and in this case john's got a denim shirt on so we want to create a denim color so to do that i'm just going to press x on my keyboard to switch to my primary white color and i'm going to double click that white circle i'm going to use my selector at the top of the color chooser and just get to a rough area of denim color i can now drag my mouse around so i think that looks kind of denim to me and once we're happy we can just press close okay we can return to our shape tool and we know the first one selected is a rectangle tool so we just left click that once and then we can left click at the top of our image and drag so keeping our finger on the left mouse button we can drag our denim color over our image as we did before we're going to change the blend mode clicking on the normal drop down and scrolling down to soft light revealing the image beneath and we can left click on the text and rename that layer shirt press enter and we can turn that layer off and we can return to our background layer and we can use the selection brush just by left clicking on the toolbar increase our brush size and we can start making a selection of john's shirt but rather than bore you with this process again i'm just going to press ctrl and d to get rid of that selection i could go to select load selection from file and i'm going to open up the shirt selection i made earlier okay with that selection live i'm now going to left click on the shirt layer recheck that check box and we're going to apply a mask so left click on the little white box with the black circle that's created a mask on our shirt layer and you can see now that the color has only been applied now to john's shirt so i press ctrl and d to deselect that first thing i notice here is that the blue is a little bit harsh so i'm going to left click now on the shirt layer make sure you don't click on the mask layer we want to click on the shirt layer this is indicated by the white bounding box and if we look at the opacity drop down we can just left click on that drop down and move a slider to the left and that reduces the opacity of that color and that looks a little bit more natural to me so once we're happy with that we can click outside our image to close that so the first thing i notice here is that the buttons here have been colored blue i wanted them to be white just need to left click on our mask on our shirt layer ensuring our mask is selected you can see that with the black bounding box we also want to make sure that black is selected as our color because we're going to be painting on to conceal so i'm going to zoom in on this button using control and the scroll wheel on the mouse i'm just going to paint black onto my mask just to reveal the white of that button and press the space bar for my hand tool i'm going to drag down to the next button and again i'm just going to paint black onto my mask to conceal that blue okay press ctrl zero i can see here there's two more buttons on john's collar so i press ctrl and scroll just to zoom in reduce my brush size slightly because it's a smaller button here and just paint black onto my mask just to allow that white to shine through drag across to the other collar and repeat just paint black onto my mask and ctrl and zero to zoom out so now we can address john's face now his skin is a little bit different we're going to use a slightly different method and in this case we're going to use a gradient map so ensuring our top layer is selected i'm going to click on this little white and black circle again just to select a new adjustment so left click and we're going to go to gradient map and john turns all psychedelic honors okay not to worry looking at the gradient map we've got three tones we've got shadows mid-tones and highlights but i want to add some extra tones to this image just to make it look that bit more natural and to do this i'm going to left click on the shadow node and i'm going to click on insert you can see we've now got a node which has been added at position 25 i'm going to left click on the mid tone node and i'm going to click insert and we've now got one added at 75 percent now you're probably thinking these colors aren't really flash colored and you'd be quite right now you can left click on each of these nodes and you can left click on the color tab and you can add any color you want so we could poach around and try and find a nice deep shadowy flesh color but there is an easier method thanks to the internet i'm going to go to the internet now and we're going to be looking at a website called colorhex.com and if you go to color palettes you can actually select skin tones so we type in skin in the search engine and just enter it brings up a nice selection of skin tones for you to choose from and if you left click on either of these it gives you a png of that palette and if you just right click you can save that image to your drive i've already done this if i return to affinity photo you can see it's a skin tone palette i've selected it's a tanned skin tone because i remember john having quite tanned skin so if i press ctrl and a that selects all of the palette and then press ctrl and c to copy i can return to the image of john i can press ctrl and v and that pastes the palette in the top left corner of john's photo now i return to the gradient map just by double clicking that layer to bring up our gradient map tool i can now left click on the shadow tone left click on the color tab and in the top right corner of the color tab you see this little picker tool now if i left click on that and drag you can see i get this magnifying glass so keep your finger on the mouse button and drag you can drag it over this first shadow color and once you're over the shadow color just let go of the mouse button and you can see this little circle next to the picker tool has turned brown and once i'm happy with that selection i can just click on this circle and it's applied to my color tab so i left click on the gradient map tool you can see my shadow color tone has now changed to this dark brown so we can move to the next one along with 25 note left click and then left click on the color tab left click on the picker and drag to our next darkest color which is the second bar across i'm happy with the selection so left click that circle and it's applied to my 25 node so let's do the others let's click on the mid tone left click the color tab left click and drag the picker to the midtone color happy with the selection left click apply and let's move to the next left click on the color tab left click on the picker and drag to the last but one which is this pinky colored one i'm happy that selection is correct so left click and that's now been applied and let's do the final highlight so left click the highlight node left click the color tile left click color picker and we're going to drag to this last bright pink color on the left i'm happy that selection has been made correctly left click the circle to apply and we can see now we've got dark skin tones all the way through to highlight skin tones and whilst we're here we might as well change the blend mode you can see here next to blend mode we've got a drop down menu so just left click on that and we're going to select soft light and we've now got the skin tone applied to john's photo okay we can close down the gradient map we can also left click on the color palette layer because we no longer need that and just press delete and now it's a case of making a selection of john's face again as we did before so we can turn off our gradient map return to our background layer open up our selection brush tool by pressing w or selecting it by clicking the left toolbar and again we can just left click and make a selection of john's face and as i've done before i've made a selection previously so in true blue peter style i'm going to press ctrl d select load selection from file and i've got john's skin but you can take as much time as you like refining your selection for your image okay once we've got our selection open we can now left click on our gradient map layer recheck the checkbox just to turn it back on again and now we're going to add a mask so it's going to left click on our mask layer icon and you can see we've now added a mask to our image so if i press ctrl and d to remove the marching ants you can see we've now applied the flesh color to john's face and again we can left click on the gradient layer and we can go to the opacity slider and drag that to the left and to the right just to get a color balance that we're happy with another thing we can also do is if we double click the gradient map layer brings up the gradient map tool we can also tweak these nodes just to adjust the shade of each color so once you're happy we can just close that down okay i'm now going to left click on the text of that layer and just call it skin right next we're going to address the color of john's eyes and to do this we're going to add another rectangle tool but we're going to use a slightly different method so just left click on the rectangle tool and this time i'm just going to drag it so that it covers both of john's eyes instead of the whole image and you'll notice here that the rectangle is white but not to worry just need to click on the little white color circle on our color palette double click to open up our color chooser and john's eyes were blue so i'm just going to drag this color selector over my blue tones and i can drag inside this square using the color tile up here as reference as i drag to find a suitable color blue and i think that will do the job just press close you can see now that the rectangle is turned blue again as we did before we need to change the blend mode so click on the normal tab scroll down to soft light then we can now see john's eyes beneath okay making sure our eye layer is selected we can left click in the text and call that eyes press enter and we can add a mask so again click on the mask layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette to add a blank mask now because the whole mask is white we can still see the whole of a rectangle so in this case we're going to press ctrl and i on our keyboard and what that does it inverts the white to black so instead of revealing all it now hides all okay if we zoom in by pressing the ctrl on our keyboard and using the scroll wheel of our mouse we can turn on our brush tool by pressing b on our keyboard or selecting from the left and if we note on the color palette our default colors aren't showing we've got black and blue so we press d return that to default because i want to reveal the blue color beneath the mask we need to be using white so just press x on our keyboard to switch between black and white on our color palette we've now got white selected when i left click on a mask just to make sure that's selected as indicated by the black bounding box and now we can start painting over john's irises just to bring in the blue so i'm just left clicking and painting white onto my mask and it's revealing the blue beneath now the pupils obviously don't need to be colored blue so if we press x to switch back to black and now i'm going to reduce my brush size and i'm going to paint black onto my mask just to mask out those pupils you know i press ctrl 0 on my keyboard to zoom out you're probably thinking wow that's kind of intense so again if we left click on the actual eye layer and you can see that's selected by the white bounding box we can now click on the opacity slider again and just reduce the opacity of that color to blend it in okay and that looks a lot more natural okay you can now look at coloring the background and in this case i'm going to color the background a color that complements john's shirt and to do this i'm going to use my color picker on the color palette it's going to left click the color picker and drag over a mid-tone of john's denim shirt and once i've selected just let go and now if i left click on the circle next to the color picker it's applied to as my primary color and now if i double click that looking at the color chooser you can see here we've got a little hashtag and this gives us a little hex code and this hex code is the code relating to that exact color i want to do is going to left click in there and it turns blue i'm going to press ctrl and c to copy and the reason i'm doing that is i'm going to go to the internet again and i'm going to go to a website which is created by adobe called adobe color so it's color.adobe.com forward slash create forward slash color wheel and this is quite a useful tool for all those interested in color science but just to keep things simple in this case i'm going to click on complementary and what that does is allows us to identify colors and their complementary colors so for instance if i drag around to orange the complementary color of orange is cyan and again if i drag around to magenta the complementary color of magenta is green but in our case we want to get a complimentary color for the denim of john's shirt and if we scroll down slightly halfway you can see one of these squares has got a little triangle and that's the base color that's being used to create these complementary colors and if we double click on this hex code beneath that square it turns blue i'm going to press ctrl and v just to paste the hex code that we took from affinity and press enter and you can see now that's my base color and we're presented with various complementary colors that we can use in our photos in this case i quite like this lighter brown rather than the dark brown so i'm just going to left click and drag over that hex code press ctrl and c i'm going to return to affinity and you can see the color chooser is still open and the hex code is still highlighted i'm going to press ctrl and v and press enter and you can see now the color tile has changed to the color that we selected on the adobe site so you can just press close and now that color is my primary color i can go to the rectangle tool again left click and this time i'm going to drag over the entirety of my image and let go we're going to change that blend mode to soft light as we did before i'm going to left click on the text and call that wall enter we can switch that layer off for now and we can return to our background layer and we can make a selection again using our selection brush which is w the shortcut and paint in our background just to select that again earlier i made a more accurate selection so if i press ctrl and d to delete that i'm going to select load selection from file and double click on background okay so i've got my background selection made i can now turn on my wall left click on my wall layer and left click on the mask layer to add my mask i press ctrl and d to get rid of those marching ants and again we can left click on the actual wall layer itself you can see the white bounding box to show it selected and we can click on the opacity slider to increase and decrease the opacity of that color but the color wheel's done its job you can see the denim shirt and the background complement each other perfectly okay hopefully that's given you an insight into how you can color black-and-white images within affinity photo and it's also taught you a little bit about masks and creating shortcuts i'm sorry it's quite a long-winded tutorial there's a lot to get through but if you did like the video please give me a like below if you haven't already please subscribe to my channel and more importantly as always thank you very much for watching goodbye

Channel: Chris P Williams

Views: 18,737

Keywords: affinity, photo, affinity photo, masking, colouring, colour, masks, black and white, black & white, black, white, gradient map, gradient, tool, selections, selection brush, selection, brush

Id: 2E1iOW_Wfr8

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020