How to Colorize Black and White Photos from the Past

hello my photography friends i hope you're well and safe and having a lovely day welcome back to my channel my name is kevin mullins i'm a documentary photographer based in the united kingdom and today my friends we're going to do something very different to anything i've done on the channel before so please bear with me and today we are going to turn some grainy grainy old really old black and white photos and i mean really old into color so we're going to look at photos like this and this and we're going to turn them into photos like this and this i appreciate that this is something a little bit different to the channel so please if you do think you need to go and watch something else watch something else on my channel rather than go to another one please that'd be great anyway you will need photoshop for this of course and it's a really simple process actually i've been playing with this idea for a long time i've seen lots of tutorials on the internet and you've probably seen some similar to yourself but i've done it in a slightly different way a little bit of a different take i guess and i really think you'll find it interesting especially those of you that have legacy photos maybe from your parents your grandparents etc these photographs came to me because i went to visit my mum a couple of weeks ago back in wales and she just gave me a whole load of pictures that my grandmother had given her now my grandmother was a very very big hoarder of things so we have hundreds and hundreds of photos and i'm gonna go through a lot of them over the next coming several months probably to try and colorize them because i find it cathartic i find it interesting and actually brings them back to life so without further ado we're going to go on to the computer go into photoshop i'm going to go through a complete edit of the one of my grandmother bless her and i'm actually going to try and give her that life the look the clothes that she wore when i remember her when she was the last very important part of my life and i'll show you a couple of others as well along the way but that one will do in full and we will speed up parts of it because some of it's very repetitive but honestly it's very simple if you've got photoshop you can do this yourself let's go [Music] so here we are in photoshop now i'm using the latest version of photoshop cc but actually none of this stuff is that advanced or that new feature so i think you'll be able to do this in most versions of photoshop certainly going back a few years so the first thing i'm going to do is rename the original layer i'm going to call it original this is a scanned image and i'm going to duplicate it i'm going to do that by pressing ctrl j on my keyboard or command j for you on the max and i'm going to rename that one to work in so now i have two layers the original one and a working one all i want to do at this point really is get the image ready so i want to crop it and do some basic cloning and editing out any dots or spots or dust or anything like that so i'm just going to crop it so it's a little bit straighter and get rid of those borders that were there from the original print we'll get that right here we go just about there zoom in a little bit so we can see a little bit better 200 percent or so and i'm just going to use the spot healing tool to just get rid of some of these dust spots as you can see just popping them on there spotting into it is really cool for this kind of thing gets rid of all of the the kind of speckles and anything that's actually on the print itself rather than anything that was in the original photograph of course so just zoom in move around the picture do that [Music] now down here we've got a little orange kind of glow so i'm actually going to use the patch tool to do that so i'm just going to drag over the the edge if you like the burnt edge just move it up there we go patch tool is really good for those kind of larger bits and that just needs a little bit of cleaning up so i'll go back to the spot eating tool and i'm just going to spot over the edges just to to try and make it all blend in together a little bit more that looks good okay so next thing we need to do is go to that layer right click and choose convert to smart object and the reason we're doing this is because we want to add a black and white mix so i want to neutralize the colors so by adding that i'm adding a black and white mix as you can see and that takes us to a pure black and white version so it gets rid of all of the orange the color cast all of that stuff so we can work with a pure black and white image going forward okay next thing we want to do is add in another adjustment layer so back down to the bottom adjustment layer and this time i'm going to choose levels so what i want to do now is bring some contrast back into the image i'm going to pull in the blacks and the whites and you can see the image there on the left it's just getting a little bit more definition just trying to make the edges a little bit more obvious and just overall make the levels of the image better and a little bit more defined to give us a better starting point there we go okay next thing we need to do is go up to image and we're going to change the color mode mode color to cmyk and that gives us the four base colors that are suitable for printing and it's going to ask you whether you want to merge the layers so we will do that of course and that will give us our basically starting point ready to start colorizing the image and this really is where the fun starts now we have to try and remember or not remember in this case but try and think about what clothes what color color the face was their hair all of those kind of things and we're gonna do this by creating a series of solid color adjustment layers okay and it's very straightforward it might seem a little bit confusing at first but let me show you how i'm going to start with the coat i know i always remember my grandmother wearing this beautiful deep green colored coat so again new adjustment layer this time we'll choose solid color and the color picker will come up now it doesn't matter if you get this wrong at this point okay we're just going for something that we think is about right i'm going to rename the layer to coat so i know where i am and then i'm going to change the blend mode to soft light that's really important changing the blend mode to soft light next thing we have to do is make sure we select the mask that's really important that you select the mask on the right hand side and you press ctrl i command i on a mac to invert it so that essentially means that we're going to be masking against the black color next up we're going to switch to a brush you can press b on the keyboard or press the brush tool on the toolbox on the left hand side set your brush up i'm tending to go for a kind of medium hardness and then it's just a case of brushing it all the way in on the coat of course and you'll see the soft light is what allows us to for the shadows etc to remain natural remain neutral throughout so it's a case of going through the whole thing i'm going to speed up parts of this so we can get a really solid view of how this is going to look next thing we'll do same again solid color this time i'm going to do the buttons so i'm going to go for a kind of off black a little gray two inches to it call it buttons and remember to set the blend mode to soft light where is it where is it uh soft light there is soft light control i on the mask and it won't take a second to do the buttons i think there's only two or three of them so we'll just go over them you see how it's just painting over those nicely darkening them up a little bit and that's good those those buttons okay so i think we'll do the shirt next i think she's wearing a shirt and a scarf which is quite hard to see so i'm just going to pick a random color initially for the shirt and then and then i'll show you how we can we can change the color as we go along okay so blend mode again soft light control i to invert we'll find the shirt on the picture itself which i think is that that little bit there and actually now i know that the color isn't quite right so i can just double click on the layer itself and pick color accordingly so i'm going to go for this deep blue like that like the look at this deep blue select the mask make sure i'm using my brush and away we go now this is quite tricky this little bit so i'm going to be changing the brush size accordingly just to do that a little bit there so i think she had a blue shirt underneath and then a scarf above it now to the scarf same thing solid color pick the color i'm gonna go for a nice red i think it might have been a nice red color choose okay change the text to scarf so i know what it is blend mode soft light control i command i and then i can brush it in there we go looks good now i've noticed down in the bottom right hand side that there's a little bit of the the arm missing so if i go back to that mask on the coat i can just go back down there it will remember that it's green of course because that's the color of the mask and i can just finish that little area up tidy up nice so it's already coming together it looks really nice already i love those colors and definitely reminds me of my my lovely nana okay next solid color and we're going to go for the skin next now again remember you don't have to get this exactly right uh let's just type that in so i know what it is skin blend mode soft light control i and then i'll start painting now remember you've got to do things like lips and eyebrows and eye color a little bit later so be a little bit more cautious when you're doing your painting on this one [Music] okay looks a little bit ghoulish right now but we need to add some color to the lips so solid color let's look for a nice red for the lips something like that yeah that looks good lips blend mode soft light control i and there we go now again you've got to be a little bit careful try and get yourself right with the colors and again remember you can adjust all this stuff later you can go back and color over color repaint change remove so i'm just going to fast forward the whole of the edit now the whole of the color blending until we get close to the end here we go [Music] okay this is looking good wicked i love it a nice colorful image of course it's not going to be exactly accurate next thing we're going to do is we're going to group all of the color edits into one group there so i'm going to hit the little folder icon in the bottom right hand side of the panel i'm just going to put them all into a group called coloring okay final touches i'm going to add a photo filter now to try and warm it up a little bit so hit photo filter i'm going to choose the warm filter as you can see on the left hand side i'm just moving that across i'm going to go to the flush and change the opacity now the flush was the thing that added the little red cheeks in the color blending so i'm just changing the opacity a little bit and that looks a little bit more natural i like the warmth that the color mode the color blending has brought in there with the filter on top okay pretty much the last thing now is we're going to add another adjustment layer curves i'm going to scroll down until i find a linear contrast what is it linear contrast come on there we go in a contrast that just gives it a little bit of depth again uh command control e to flatten the image now one thing you might want to do is also at this point do a unsharp mask filter sharp and sharp mask changes as accordingly now i i it didn't really work on this particular image so i'm going to cancel it out but that might be something you want to do depending on how much contrast and how much clarity the image is lost during the edit okay so final retouches if any that are needed now i'm going to create a new layer and i'm just going to i'm going to duplicate the layer i should say i'm just going to use the burn tool mid exposure about 50 maybe bring it down a little bit i'm just going to darken a little bit of the highlights on that face there so just bringing them down a tiny little bit and that's good i'm gonna merge it again and i think pretty much we're good to go and here's the before and after so obviously the one on the left is the before one the one on the right is the new one that we've edited and i think it's lovely it really is lovely and of course it's not gonna look like a perfect picture it's a little bit cartoony perhaps in some cases you might want to adjust your editing accordingly but it's really really straightforward and simple all you have to do is remember to do those solid color blend modes and you need to do a soft light filter and control i or command i to invert the mask and then paint away and you will have a loads of fun okay i'm going to go through one more very quickly i'm going to speed it all the way up so i'm not going to show you any of the steps this is going to be really really quick it's my great great great grandfather and this photograph was taken in 1870 believe it or not have a look at this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay what did you think i thought i was a lot of fun actually um it's not something necessarily you're going to be doing all the time but you know if you have a little bit of time such as maybe perhaps if you're a wedding photographer with no weddings to photograph then you can kill some time with this anyway listen uh this weekend i'm off with my wife we're going to go and have a nice weekend together uh hopefully as long as the government doesn't get in the way first and make us wear masks and sit six meters away from each other and all that stuff have a lovely day have a lovely weekend ahead and i shall see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Kevin Mullins

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Id: jt5H2fwhavA

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020