Adding color can bring your old black and
white photos to life, eliciting emotion from the viewer and allowing them to connect to
the image in a way they wouldn’t if it were just in gray scale. In this video, we’re going to learn a simple
and effective method to colorize your black and white photos in Photopea. We’ll be using this image today, check the
description for the link to download it and follow along. The way this method works, is by taking a
series of solid color layers, and using blending modes and masking to only affect the areas
we want to color. We’re going to need a separate color fill
layer for each element of the photo we want to colorize. Let’s start with her skin. Click on New Adjustment layer, and select
Color Fill. I’ll rename this new layer to skin, change
the blending mode to color, and set the opacity to about 70%. Right now, the skin layer’s mask is allowing
everything through. We want to invert this mask, and then use
the brush to reveal the color in the areas where her skin is. To invert the mask, click on the mask’s
thumbnail, and press Ctr-I. Press B to activate the brush tool, set the foreground color to
white, and start painting over her skin. Now, the skin layer is coloring in where we
paint. But, we need to change the color to a more
natural skin tone. You can try to select the color on your own,
but it can be difficult to get a natural looking color, especially when you’re just starting
out with this method. I like to use a reference image, to borrow
the colors from. This is best if you have another image of
the same person, preferably in similar lighting. I don’t have a color image of this woman,
so we’ll have to make due with this image. The link for this is also in the description. Just drag and drop the reference image onto
the canvas, to add it to our project, and click confirm. I’ll use the move tool to drag it down a
bit, out of the way. Double click the skin layer thumbnail, and
click on the color swatch to set the color, and click on the reference image to sample
her skin tone. Click around until you find a shade that you
think looks best, and then hide the reference image layer. Then, select the skin layer’s mask, and
start painting white to reveal the color anywhere her skin is. Lower the size of the brush to get any hard
to reach areas, and try to fill in the outline first, then increase the size of the brush,
and fill in the center. Get right up against her hair, and her eyes. Just paint right over her eyebrows, and her
eyelashes. If you go too far, just switch the foreground
color to black, and mask out any areas that shouldn’t be skin tone. This whole process can go much faster if you
can get a good selection of the area you want to color, and just use the paint bucket tool
to fill the entire selection area with white. But, for this image, I’m just going to use
the brush tool to unmask the color. From here, just keeping painting and unmasking,
until all of her skin is colorized. Once you’ve colorized all of her skin, you
can adjust the opacity to get a more natural look. The higher the opacity, the more cartoony
or fake it will look, especially if you aren’t using a natural skin tone, like the one we
got from our reference image. Next, let’s color in her eyes. Zoom in on her face, and create a new adjustment
layer, color fill, and rename it to Eyes. Click on the mask to select it, and press
Ctr-I to invert it. Set the blending mode to color, and leave
the opacity to 100 percent. Now, use the brush tool to paint white to
unmask the color over her iris. Do the same for the other iris. The red does look pretty cool, but unless
she’s a terminator, it’s kind of unrealistic. So, double click the fill color, and click
the color swatch, and I’ll change it to a light blue. Then, drop the opacity down until it feels
natural to you. I think 100% would be fine, but I’m going
to pull it down to about 80%. Next, let’s move on to her lips. Add a New Adjustment Layer, select color fill,
and rename the layer to lips. Press Ctr-I to invert the mask, and reveal
everything, then set the blending mode to Overlay. When you’re coloring images, I find that
the Color blending mode works great most of the time. But, if it looks odd or unnatural, try using
the Overlay mode, or sometimes the Soft Light mode. Just experiment with these three blending
modes as you go, and use whichever one looks the most natural to you. Set the opacity down, to about 60%. Then, using white, with the Lip’s mask selected,
start painting to reveal the color. The lips are another element that you may
want to use the reference image to grab a natural color from. So, I’ll unhide the Reference image, and
take a sample from her lips. Hide the reference image layer, and start
painting to unmask her lips. Paint everywhere on her lips, but make sure
not to unmask her teeth. If the color looks a little odd, don’t worry,
we can adjust it after by taking another sample from the reference, or just adjusting the
opacity. You can see that the transition between her
lips and skin looks a little unnatural, it’s a sharp transition. What we can do, is add some feather to the
Lip’s mask, to soften that edge. With the mask selected, open up the properties
tab, and I’ll set the Feather to somewhere around 3.5 to 4. That gives us a little bit of blur right on
the edge, softening that transition. If we zoom out, it’s already starting to
look a lot better. All we need to do now, is color in her hair,
her dress and the background. Let’s do the hair next. She has a lot of wispy hair here, that will
make it difficult to color without getting a good selection. Check out my video on removing the background
from an image where I show how to make a good selection on fine strands of hair. For this example, we’re just going to use
the brush, and get as close as we can. What’s important here, is the technique
of coloring the image. Add a new adjustment layer, and choose color
fill. Rename this layer to Hair. Select the hair layer mask, and press Ctr-I
to invert it, and let’s take a sample from the reference image to get a good hair color. I want to grab a really light shade, something
like this. Hide the reference image, set the blending
mode of the hair layer to color, and set the opacity to 70%. Then, just continue painting white on the
Hair mask, revealing the color as you go. I’ll try to get some of the bigger pieces
of wispy hair, but I’m not going to focus on that too much. Once her hair is unmasked, we can adjust the
opacity to make it look a little more natural. I think about 55% looks good. Next, we’ll color in her dress. New adjustment layer, color fill, rename it
to Dress, press Ctr-I to invert the mask, and set the blending mode to soft light, which
will look a little more natural on the fabric of her dress. Set the opacity to 70%. For the dress, you can make it any color you’d
like, I think blue would look right, but you can color it however you’d like to. Then, just use the brush tool to paint white
on the dress mask, starting with the edges. Make sure not to overlap any of the areas
we’ve colored in, and if you do, just switch the foreground color to black, and mask out
the areas where you went to far. I’ll go ahead and fill in the rest of the
dress. Once the dress is unmasked, we can adjust
the opacity to a more natural level. If you used a different color than I did,
you may need more or less opacity to get something that looks right, but I’ll set it to around
40%. And finally, we just do the same thing, one
more time for the background. Add a new adjustment layer, color fill, and
rename it to background. Set the blending mode to overlay, and the
opacity to about 50%. I’ll set the color to a light green, but
feel free to use whatever color you think will look nice. We could use the same method, by inverting
the mask, and using the brush to reveal the color on the background areas. But this time, we’re not going to invert
the mask. We’re going to take all of the masks we
created before, and combine them into one new mask, which should leave just our background
area showing. We’ll only have to make a few edits to fix
a few spots that don’t mask correctly. First, let’s delete the mask that was created
with our Background layer, by right clicking the mask, and selecting Delete Raster Mask. Now, if you press Control and click on one
of the masks we made previously, Photopea will make a selection of the mask. Then, we can hold down shift and control,
and click on the next mask, and it will add to the selection we just made. Do this for all of the masks we just created,
shift control click to select each of them. Once you have all of the masks added to your
selection, click on the background layer, go up tot he layer menu, and select Raster
Mask, hide selection. Now, if we alt-click the Background Mask,
you can see the actual mask, and you can see the areas that are not being masked. The whites of her eyes, her teeth and lots
of other small areas are going to be affected by the Background color. Just use the brush tool with the foreground
set to black, and fill in these areas. Alt-Click the mask again to hide the mask. Now it looks pretty good, but there are a
couple areas where it looks wrong. If we zoom in on her arm, you can see some
areas where the background color is bleeding into the wrong areas. There may be some large areas that you missed
while masking the rest of the image, and if there are you’ll need to use the brush tool
to fill those in. But, for stuff like this, where the it just
bleeds over a little bit, we can add some feather to the background mask. Open up the Background Mask’s properties
panel, and drag the Feather property up, until it smooths out those edges. If you go too far, the background color will
start to blur into her skin, so you need to be subtle with the feather, and keep it just
high enough to slightly blur that hard line. OK, we’re almost finished. At this point, we can select all of the color
layers, by selecting the background layer, and shift clicking the skin layer, and add
them all to a folder, by clicking the new folder icon. I’ll rename the folder to color, and we
can toggle the visibility of the folder, to see the before and after. Last, we’re going to add one more adjustment
layer, inside of the color folder. Go to New Adjustment Layer, and select Curves. Add three points evenly up the grid. Drag the first point down just a little, to
strengthen the shadows a bit. Do the same with the second point, bring it
down just enough to give some more contrast. Do the same with the third point, adjust it
until it looks natural. Be careful because you can easily go too far,
and make the image look washed out. Once you adjust the curves layer and everything
looks natural, go ahead and a/b your image, and see the progress you made. That’s all there is to it. Nothing about this process is very difficult,
but it can be time consuming to get your masks edited correctly, and to select colors that
make the image look realistic. Using this technique, you can easily transform
any black and white photo to color, if you put the effort in to get everything looking
nice. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
