How to Colorize a Black and White Photo in Photoshop

[Music] hey guys in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to add color to an old black and white photo there's a few ways to do this but I'm gonna be using solid color fill layers with layer masks and different blend modes that way everything that we do will be non-destructive so you can come back and change it later you can download the project files for this tutorial to see how everything was put together and have a photo to work from if you don't have one of your own let's get started so the first thing that we're gonna do is add color to our sky so using the quick selection tool I'm just gonna start drawing in the sky here and it's gonna select everything that's a similar color and you'll need to zoom in and holding alt you'll need to take out some of these areas that you don't want selected next I want to smooth my edge bit so I'm gonna click the refine edge button and I'm gonna turn on smart radius and increase the radius to about 5 pixels or so and then turn my smooth slider up to about 3 and hit OK now that my selection is made I'm gonna come down to my layers palette and click the new solid color layer and we're gonna choose a nice blue color since it's gonna be a blue for the sky and you'll see that it used our selection to create a new layer mask on our solid color layer now I'm gonna set the blend mode to overlay and then I can double click my layer and adjust the color until I get what I want and hit OK since this uses layer masks you can always come in and clean this up a little bit so I'm gonna click my layer mask and using a black brush I'm gonna paint down here a little bit just to soften the edge between the sky and the ground that looks pretty good now we're gonna repeat this process and do the same thing with the ground so I'm going to use my quick selection tool just to select the ground here and zoom in and clean up any little edges that I don't want selected then I'm gonna click refine edge again and turn on the smart radius and increase that a bit and then I'm gonna smooth my edge just a tiny bit and hit okay again I'm gonna come create a new solid color fill layer and I'm gonna make it kind of a greenish brown and hit OK and then I'm gonna set that blend mode to overlay as well and go back in and adjust my color until I get something that's a little more realistic next we're gonna select his jacket and hat so I'm gonna click the background layer again and using my quick selection tool I'm gonna paint all over his jacket and the hat and like usual you'll have to zoom in and fix some of the areas that you don't want selected and again I'm gonna click refine edge and turn on smart radius increase that a bit and then smooth it out just a little and hit OK again I'm gonna create a new solid color layer and this time choose a kind of yellowish orange Brown and hit OK and this time I'm gonna set the blend mode to color and go back in and adjust my color you'll have to experiment with which blend mode works best for each color but usually overlay or color works the best now we're gonna select the skin so I'm gonna click my background layer again and zoom in a bit and using my quick selection tool I'm gonna paint all over his face and neck and remove any areas of a selection that I don't want selected again I'm gonna come click refine edge and turn on smart radius and increase that a bit maybe a little more than usual because the hair and then I'm gonna smooth it out just a little bit and hit OK now I'll need to remove his eyes from this selection so what I'm gonna do is zoom in and I'm gonna press Q to turn on quick mask mode and what that lets me do is use the brush tool to paint in my selection so since I want to remove his eyes I'm gonna use black in quick mask mode and I'm just gonna paint on his eyes to remove them from my selection now when I'm done if I press Q again you'll see that they've been removed from my selection so I'm gonna create a new solid color layer again and I'm gonna choose kind of a peach skin tone color then I'm gonna set the blend mode for this layer to color and skin tones are pretty tricky to get right so you'll usually have to go in and adjust the color a few times till you get something that you're happy with next I'm going to add some color to his eyes and rather than use the quick selection tool I'm gonna do it manually just because they're round and it's pretty easy to do so I'm gonna create a new solid color layer and I'm gonna set it to blue cuz I want to give him blue eyes and then I'm gonna click the layer mask and press ctrl I to invert it so I hide all of that blue that I just created and then using my brush tool and the color white I'm gonna paint just on the irises of his eyes now I'm gonna set the blend mode to color and I'm going to decrease the saturation of the blue that I had selected lastly we're gonna add some color to his hair so again I'm going to click the background layer and using my quick selection tool I'm gonna select all the hair and deselect any areas that I don't want selected now I'm gonna click refine edge and if I move this you'll see that the hair has kind of extra selections around it in the sky so if I turn on smart radius and increase that you'll see that it starts to soften the edges and remove some of those sky areas and with refine edge still open I can actually use this brush tool and paint on areas where I want refine edge to do a little more work so usually this helps you select hair a little better and then I'm gonna smooth it out just a little bit and hit okay again I'm gonna create a new solid color layer and choose a dark brown color and I'm gonna set this to overlay and I'm gonna zoom out and adjust that color just a little bit maybe make it a little brighter now you can go back and adjust the blend mode for any of the colors or the colors themselves and clean up any of these masks in areas that you might have missed the first time around the more time you spend on all the little details the better it's gonna look and if we were going to finish this particular image I'd keep going and colorize things like the buttons and the metal on his shirt and maybe this insignia on the side of his sleeve the project files for this tutorial have a little more accurate colors but I hope this video shows you just how easy it is to add color to any photo I'm John shaver for Photoshop video academy thanks for watching I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: New Layer

Views: 2,150,501

Keywords: black, How-to (Media Genre), add color, colorize, photograph, black and white, color, Adobe Photoshop (Software), soldier, vintage, retro, photo, how to, white, Graphic Design, photoshop, photography, tutorial

Id: C2Srw245R7U

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 05 2014