How to Colorize Black and White Images in Photoshop

today I will show you how to colorize your black-and-white images so let's start hey guys it's Nemanja and welcome to another really fun episode today I will show you a few different techniques how you can colorize your black-and-white photos so without further ado let the fun begin today we will use black-and-white photo of this cute boy and we will add a course of the top of it to make this photo even more interesting so how to do that well basically there are a few different ways how I like to do it and I will show you all of them and you can then choose one or maybe combination of two three of them to make your masterpiece so basically it's easy like this you need a new layer you need the brush and you need a color any color from a color palette that you want I will choose a bluish color to colorize let me see to colorize this shirt and if I just use the brush and paint over the top of this shirt I will not get anything I will just get color over the top of that I'll lose all the details down below because my layer it's in a normal blending mode we need to change blending mode for this if you're not familiar with blending modes you can watch my tutorial about all photoshop's blending modes right here okay for this blending boss that works the best our color obviously and overlay and soft light if you put it in a color blending mode you will see that shirt will become blueish and we will have all details down below if you put two overlay overlay we'll add a little bit more contrast it you can see and soft light it's softer version of overlay blending mode as you can see here so I like to put it in a color blending mode and paint over the top of this shirt and get this shirt colorized alright this is one method just to use empty layer on a color blending mode and brush and colorize it second method I will delete this second method is to go and choose solid color adjustment layer choose any color we'll use the same color choose any color you want put this into a color blending mode or overlay and soft light and now go here invert the mask control command I and do the same just paint over the top of this shirt okay and you have this shirt colorized of course I'm doing this really fast now just because to save some times for this tutorial but when you're doing this for yourself or if I would do this for client I will spend a lot more time tweaking this making better selection of the shirt and and adding that color but this is just for example here and it's pretty much pretty much okay let's go eyes this white - why not right let's I think this is Kim here the part of the arm and let's colorize this okay right so and we are basically basically done here with the shirt and why I like this way better while I prefer this method better than just using a layer and color over the top of that because now it's much easier for me to change the color if I'm not satisfied with this color how to do that well it's really easy just double click on this soft roll or adjustment layer and you can change this into any color you want so I will go with the blue maybe something like like this is okay and that's it I can always go back and change second method or if you count from beginning third matter it's the go and use another adjustment layer and this time we will use color balance alright color balance is really nice because we can again change the color and with the color balance we can put the color balance into some blending mode for example color right and change that or we can just leave it in normal and check this preserve luminosity or unchecked depends of the results we want to achieve and you don't need to put this into any blending mode of those three the dimension right I will just find some skin tone maybe add some yellowish and reddish tint to to the shadows mid-tones and highlights right something like so if you're not satisfied with the final result I can always go back and tweak those sliders to get a perfect version of the color that I want I will invert the mask with ctrl or command I and again I just need to paint over the skin here so I will fast forward this and I will come back in a few seconds alright guys that's it and if you can see here I painted across the hair here eyebrows and part of the hair here and so on and so on and now if you want to tweak this really nice and fast I will show you another great trick how to do it just double click on the layer here and I will use the blend if tool if you're not familiar about the blend if tool it's really powerful tool in Photoshop please watch my tutorial about that right here ok I will not cover the blend if here in this tutorial I will just go fast and do the thing I will go to Android layer and I will protect the shadows from the underlying layer so that means that I will protect the shadows from this background layer down below ok I'll go and move this and press and hold alt or option key and just separate this to have this nice gradual transition right like so and this is before and after as you can see the shadows are now protected wet and I really like that what I don't like here is the color of the skin so I can always go here double click and change change some settings tweak this if I don't like it let's go to highlights maybe add a little bit more reddish go to shadows maybe reduce things like so of course you can tweak this as much as you want and sometimes this will work better let's preserve the luminosity sometimes this method will work better sometimes this solid color layer will work better and so on of course you can combine you can add to this maybe curse adjustment layer and clip it to effect only this layer and then change the tone maybe make the skin a little bit darker and so on and so on for now let's leave it like so we can always tweak it later and let's go to the lips so the fourth method how to colorize an image is just to use the curves or level adjustment layer actually I prefer curves a much much better because I have more options with the curse so I will just curse adjustment layer and I will go to the channels I'll go to red I will add the red to colorize the lips right some redness and I will reduce the blue to add some yellow tint to it of course the curves blending mode you don't need to put in any of the blending modes because the curves manual you just changed the color and of course the lightness and if you preserve all the details from the image so you don't need to put it in a color blending mode for example but if you put it in a color blending mode you will preserve the lightness from original background original image down below but you'll just change the color let me show that now as you can see I make the blue darker or actually I added some yellow and here I made the red brighter or added some yellows to the photo so if I go from normal to color you will have you can see the difference because here I changed the luminosity of the image but here in a color blending mode I didn't mess with the luminosity at all I just changed the color of it so I will go invert this mask with control command I and just go to the lips and colorize this as you can see I like these lips to be a little bit more reddish so I will do that in a second just to add a color here and again we can go to curves and change change this color to maybe a little bit more here here of course we need to spend a little bit more time but for this tutorial let's go to the green and reduce green to add more magenta to it maybe something like like so let me see and I don't want so much yellow to the lips maybe like so let me see this is really really nice red really nice combination of scholars we can go here maybe in tweak tweak to add a little bit more let me see just the touch and now what I like to do I'm not satisfied with the skin tone too much but maybe like this okay now what we need to do is to add some imperfection in a skin color because skin it's not one color it's combination of your colors some areas has more magenta tint more yellowish tint and so on and so on what I will do here if I'm doing this for a client I will use some photo as a reference for a skin color and I will try to play with that but here I will go with a solid color adjustment layer use the reddish or maybe pinkish tint like so put it in a color blending mode and invert the mask okay and now I will use brush really soft maybe 10% opacity or so and I will add some color imperfections here maybe even 5 percent opacity and add some redness here to the nose maybe here around the lips here then redness a little bit here and there okay let me see maybe a little bit of the redness right here on the ears make this a little bit more and of course this is really quick and sloppy job but it will do a trick here of course that I will spend a lot more time tweaking this if this is a project for a client or so and this is look this is really nice it's looking much better than before this is before and after before after let me show before and after I like how this reddish tint maybe in the cheeks here like so and this is too much maybe here just add some infractions of course you can add a little bit more of yellowish tint or even greenish tint and so on and the shadows here as you can see we can desaturate maybe we can use hue and saturation adjustment layer desaturate a little bit invert it and just just paint with white maybe 10% opacity just dissipate the shadows a little bit more of course then we can colorize the eyes use any of those techniques that i show you i will use solid color layer i like eyes to be maybe some brownish tint like so put it in a color binding mode inverted and just paint here with brown or just this part I will not paint the highlights I will leave the highlights white or even I will paint the highlights maybe to blue because I think it's the sky in the reflection but for now let's leave it like so and I can use the same brown color with maybe just 10% opacity to colorize the hair just add a little bit of the color here and maybe there goes this is just really quickly of course here it's not so good well let's let it live here okay and I will use new layer solid color it looks really dark maybe like so and then I will call rice put this into color blending mode and colorize the hair with this okay like so why not and of course we need to tweak this inside part of the skin a little bit more but for this tutorial I will not do that let me see this is really nice of course you can colorize the background let me just show you really quickly I would put new adjustment layer down below just about the background it will be solid color and I will use some bluish really light bluish like so almost grey invert it put it in a color blending mode and with 100% opacity I will just paint here and this is still too saturated for my taste I'll change it and this is really nice as you can see really nice and easy of course we can put this into overlay blending mode why not it will have a different result better for my taste yes I like it very much let's unzoom it so this is really great let's group all those color layers into one group ctrl command G is the shortcut and let's name this color like so and as you can see guys this is before and this is after before and after really nice result and it's not perfect because this is really fast and sloppy job but for this tutorial and for your understanding how to do it this is really really nice result of course you don't need to use this only on humans you can colorize anything in Photoshop for example you can colorize a dog or a car or anything that you want I will show how I did that on a dog here as you can see I have black and white photo of this really nice dog and those are my layers here I used only the technique with a solid color adjustment layer and this is before this is after we really impact this image by adding color to it this is before this is after I really like the reside result here alright guys that's it for today I really hope that you liked this tutorial and that you learn something new from today's episode of course you can use this technique not just to colorize your black and white photos but to add some color imperfections or change some colors on your color images just practice experiment and have fun mastering this technique if you have any questions regarding to this episode please leave them in the comments below I will be glad to answer them if you want to support me in this channel to make it even bigger and better you can do it by visiting my patreon page the link is down there in the description alright guys subscribe if you're not already ring that bell to get notified about the future episodes and see you guys in the next one bye bye

Channel: Nemanja Sekulic

Views: 839,696

Keywords: Colorize, How to Colorize Black and White Images, colorize black and white photo, bw, Color, Photoshop, Tutorial, Nemanja Sekulic, add color, how to add color, Colorise, B&W, How to, の仕方, howto

Id: 5fzb-qLL2wo

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2018