GIMP Tutorial: Restore Color to Black and White Photo

[Music] this is Nick with logos Viacom and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can restore color to a black and white photo using so we'll go ahead and get started here on a by the way if you'd like to know how you can make Gibbs updated appearance like I have here on my screen with these new icons I'll have a link to that information in the description of the video so what I'm gonna do first is open up the image or black-and-white image that we want to restore color to and the first thing I want to do is right-click on this and just make sure we have an alpha channel added if that's available go ahead and click that to add an alpha Channel what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through and just manually add color to each segment so the first thing I'm going to do is the sky in the water here and then I'm gonna do the sand I then in a car body itself so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click this little icon that says create a new layer and I'm gonna use transparency and go ahead and click OK we're gonna set the mode to overlay and then I want to pick a color for the sky in the water so I'm gonna come over here for our color picker I'm gonna grab a shade of blue maybe something like that and go ahead and click OK and I'll go to edit go with foreground color and that's gonna fill in the the sky it's gonna fill in the whole image but we're paying attention to the sky in the water because that's what we want to color in and what I'll do now is I'm gonna right click on that layer and I'm gonna go to add layer mask and from this I'm gonna choose black full transparency and go ahead and click add and that's gonna get rid of all the color but what we're gonna do next is flip this color around so we get the white we have the white as the foreground and I'm gonna grab a paintbrush and I'm gonna use maybe a soft brush like this over here I'm gonna make the brush a little bigger and I'm just gonna go ahead and paint in the sky with that brush I'll make that a little bigger so we can fill in more of that at time I'm gonna paint in the sky and the water go ahead and fill that in over here like this and I'm not paying close attention to the edges of the details just yet I want to fill in these big large areas first and I'll go and go through there and do that which I'll do now I guess not so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to shrink down the size of this brush and I'll come down here and I'm gonna fill in the fine details a little bit it's okay if it bleeds over a little bit we'll go back and correct that in a minute I'm gonna go and fill in these edges here like that fill that in and these little areas over here this is gonna be a little bit tricky because there's a lot of fine detail over here so what I do is I'm gonna go fill this all in this is gonna be very time a little time consuming I'll fill this all in that and I'll I'll speed it up and catch up with you when I'm done okay so now that I'm finished going over all the fine details with the smaller brush what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna flip the color around here and I'm gonna change this to black and I'm gonna go back over these areas where it spilled over the border a little bit and I'm just gonna color that in with black and that's gonna erase it so that's another handy little trick for doing this is that you want to go ahead and clean up these edges using the black brush when we're using layer masks and likewise if you go over the edge again you can just flip the brush back around to white and fill it back in so I'll go ahead and fill in these little details here oops I'll go ahead and fill these little details in and I'll catch up with you once I'm done okay so now that I'm done with that I'm gonna go ahead and color in the next portion of the photo which is gonna be the sand here so I'm gonna create a new layer and again we want to use full transparency go ahead and click OK we want to set the mode of this layer to overlay we're pretty much following the same steps as we previously used and then I'll flip this back around I'll get black as the foreground so I could change that to like a sand color maybe something like this over here go ahead and click OK and then go to edit fill with foreground color and it's gonna call it it's gonna fill everything in with that sand color and what I could do now is I could go back to the white brush over here make this a little bigger a lot bigger actually right click this go to add layer mask if I can find it there it is add layer mask black full transparency go ahead and click add and I'll just color in the area where I want there to be colored in sand like that and fill that all in and then I'll grab I'll make the brush smaller and I'll go around here and handle the details just like we did previously so I'll go ahead and fill this in and I'll catch up with you once I'm done okay so now that that that that's finished the final step would be to color in the body of the car here which I'm going to come up here click on the top layer and then I'll click on the create a new layer button same steps as we did for the previously the previous two layers full transparency click OK we're gonna set the mode to overlay and I'm going to choose a shade of red you can make the car whatever color you'd like I'm gonna choose a shade of red something like that we're gonna edit fill with foreground color right-click the layer add layer mask and we want to use black full transparency again go ahead and click OK and now we're good to go we could switch the brush back to white and then just go ahead and color in the body of the car like that and I'll go ahead and fill this in this is gonna be this takes a little bit of while because there's a lot of fine intricate detail here you got to go around a lot of different edges and erase whatever you fill in that like those little silver chrome and blooms like you see over here so this takes a lot of takes a lot of time and focus so I'll just go ahead and fill this in and I'll catch up with you once I'm done you okay so as you can see here I filled in the body of the car what I have to do now is flip the brush over to black so I can go through the image here and get rid of these edges where where it bled out over outside of the boundary of the image so I'll just go ahead through there real quick and just do this up really quickly and then I'll catch up with you once I'm done okay so as you can see here I finished detailing everything I didn't put much time into this I want you want to keep this somewhat quick for the video but you get the general idea that's how you can go about restoring color to a black and white photo using and obviously if you want to get a little more carried away you could add more layers and add individual color things like the the lights themselves you can make them yellow or something or give them different color crimson but that should give you a general idea of how to go about doing this using so if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 43,240

Rating: 4.9611993 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp black and white, gimp restore color, restore color black and white, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick

Id: YFDdS9iRfPE

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2017