How to Colorize in Photoshop

today I'm going to show you how to colorize in Photoshop hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE and you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning photoshop & photography fun and in today's episode we're going to show you a great feature within Photoshop it's called colorized now it's nested within the hue/saturation adjustment layer and basically what it'll do is they'll turn any color you have into a single color so in today's episode we're going to show you how to take the hair of our subject which is it's a pink hair she's wearing a wig and we're going to change it to different colors and then we're going to be using layer masks to give it a nice gradient effect to make it actually look like it fades from one color to another you can use these techniques to colorize any object in Photoshop we got a great episode guys let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop alright guys so here's our image for today now I want to colorize our subjects hair and we're going to do her eye makeup as well to kind of like mimic what's going on here in her hair so the first thing I need to do is get a selection of this color so what we're going to do on our background layer I'm going to go to select and down to color range so we're going to select this color range now I have my little eyedropper tool here I'm going to click on our hair and then we have a slider here for fuzziness so we can bring this up or down and it's going to select more and less based on how much fuzziness we have okay now in this case let's say we bring it right up to about there which does select a decent bit of the hair but you can also see it's starting to select some of the eyes and some of the background as well okay so this is pretty normal because the hair colors you know we saw that already there is some pink in the eyes as well and looks like there's some think in the background so it's going to select out some of that stuff not a huge deal let's go ahead and hit OK here there we go and then we're going to load this selection as a layer mask and in this case we're you going to colorize so we want to use a hue/saturation adjustment layer so let's go up here to layer down to new adjustment layer and over to hue saturation now because let's hit OK there because I had that selection active it loads that selection automatically as a layer mask okay now our layer mask looks great but we do need to refine it just a little bit because again remember it's selected part of the face and part of the background we're going to go ahead and show you guys how to use a brush tool set to overlay mode to really do a great job of refining the edges of a layer mask all right so now it's time to edit our layer mask now a quick tip for you guys if you hold alt or option and click on your layer mask it basically shows you what your layer mask looks like on your actual image hold alt or option and click on it to get it back to where it was now let's click here and what I want to do is make sure the hair is white and the rest of my subject is black because we don't want this colorized layer to be visible on the rest of the area so here's a great tip we're eating is our brush tool hit B for the brush tool now if you see if I paint white on my brush tool with my brush tool right now in in regular normal mode here and I paint white it's just going to cover everything all right this is just a regular normal brush now if I change our layer sorry the brush blend mode from normal down to overlay there we go what it's going to do is it's going to lighten up all the areas that are already light but you can see as I paint over these black areas nothing happens and that's because it's only going to light in areas that are already light so this is a really nice easy way to actually refine the edge of a selection so in this case you can see I'm painting white right over here on the edges now when it comes time to make this area darker all I have to do is paint with black so I'm going to hit my little arrow here or you can hit X on your keyboard and now we can play paint here on our background and you're going to see the brush will just naturally stop at the edge of the hair because we're using our overlay blend mode okay so it's not going to affect the light areas it's only in effect the dark areas so again if you're painting with white it'll just affect the light areas if you're painting with black you'll just affect the dark areas now in some of these cases like this I want to paint that black so I'm going to paint over it you can see didn't get it all just click again and again and again you basically just have to do this more and more and more times but the whole idea with this set to overlay is that it's only going to affect pixels or colors that are similar to where you're actually painting so again just a really quick tip a great way to edit a layer mask okay now in this case we do have some like black here and over here as well so let's go ahead and switch back to white and now I'm going to change by our layer or the brush blend mode we're going to change it back to normal and I'm going to use a smaller brush and just be a little bit more careful when I paint you know I don't want to do something like that because that's going to destroy our layer mask right so we're just going to choose a smaller brush here and just make sure we're painting just in these areas there alright and we'll do the same right over here and a little bit of feathering over here is okay we're going to glowed our we're going to work on our layer mask a little bit more when it comes to working with our colorize okay so now our layer mask looks great let's hold alt or option and click here on our layer mask again and we're ready to go so again make sure you've got your layer mask set to basically cover just the area you actually want to colorize okay now let's jump in and show you how to colorize so with our layer mask in place let's go ahead and click here on our hue/saturation icon which brings up our property window okay and now we're going to click on our colorize button so again what colorize will do is it will turn any color into any other color now we have control over hue saturation and lightness so let's go ahead and bring up our saturation so we can see what we're doing here okay and you can see we have this nice pink color now as I click and drag my slider from the right to the left you can see we're basically colorizing to any color we want alright and the hair for the most part looks really good the selection looks really good now in this case we do have some area here okay where the layer mask doesn't actually cover right so what we're going to do before we get into doing all our colorizing let's go ahead and make sure our layer mask actually looks how we want it so for this I'm going to grab our brush tool that's it be for the brush tool okay we're going to paint with a normal blending mode on our brush and I'm just going to paint with a soft edge brush right over here there we go to make sure we're actually covering up this area now here's a quick tip so in this case you can see I am painting over top of the hair okay and that that's pretty obvious right like okay paint of the area you want to color but colors tend to bounce around in an image so for instance if there was some blue here in the hair let's just turn this layer off and you can see there's actually a lot of pink right around the edges of our skin and that's because this is pink here the colors are going to bounce back and forth between the face and the hair so in this case if the hair is going to be blue we don't want this to be pink right here we'd want it to be blue so what I'm going to do so we're going to choose a large soft edge brush okay so let's go ahead and right click we can choose our size we'll go ahead and bring that up there we go that looks pretty good and our hardness we're going to bring down to zero okay now here I want to choose my flow we're going to change this down to 10% because right now it's just going to make everything visible right so I want to bring my flow down to 10% and that's just going to allow me to paint a little bit at a time so I'm going to hit shift 1 to bring our flow down to 10% or you can simply click here and drag this left or right okay or you can click up there and type in 10 anything that works for you okay so now our flow of 10 it's going to allow me to just put a little bit of color right there on our subjects face okay so I'm just kind of painting on the edge there with a large soft edge brush what it's doing is it's going to bring a little bit of that blue into the cheeks of our subject and if you paint too much not a big deal just hit paint with black then it's going to paint it away all right so there you can see we've colored the hair but we've got a little bit of the blue kind of coming in and coloring the skin as well and that's just because when you have color here it's going to kind of bounce around the image a little bit okay great so now our layer masks look great let's go ahead and show you how to colorize the hair and we're going to do it in a couple of different steps alright so we've got our layer mask set into place we've got our hue/saturation adjustment layer and we're set to colorize which again we can color this to any color we want now in this case I actually want to color the hair underneath this little flip here a different color from the top so we can kind of get it to look like it's fading now you might want to click here and then just paint black on your layer mask right over here and say okay that did it but the problem here is remember we spent all that time creating this really nice layer mask and I don't want to actually destroy this layer mask so here's a quick tip you can actually use two layer masks on a single layer and you do it by grouping a layer with itself so in this case we're going to hit ctrl or command G to group this layer with itself and then I'm going to click on a layer mask for the group so anything that I do with the layer mask here on the group is going to affect what's going on here in this layer okay so now the layer mask on the group we're going to use our black paint brush and I'm going to go ahead and paint black there we go right around this edges it kind of looks like cotton candy it's pretty cool effect here alright so we're going to paint black on our layer mask right up there and just make sure that our hair kind of fades from this nice pink to that blue all right yeah that looks really cool there okay so the reason I did that again is because now this layer mask here for the group basically is just telling this colorized to not be visible up top there ok so that's what this is doing the layer mask for my colorized layer is still exactly in place okay we haven't edited the layer mask for this and that's really helpful because now I'm going to actually do this again let's go ahead and duplicate this entire group so I'm going to click on the group and I'm going to drag it to the new layer icon here we have Group one copy okay and now what I want to do let's go ahead and fill this layer mask with white so I'm going to click on my layer mask we're going to go to edit down to fill and we're going to go ahead and fill this with white there we go so you can see basically we have the same adjustment right we have a hue/saturation layer set to colorize okay and now we have one of these layers is only affecting the bottom right and then one of these layers is affecting everything so what we're going to do here I'm going to go ahead and change the color of my hue/saturation adjustment layer so let's double here and I'm going to click and drag this instead of going like blue we're going to change it to like a nice light let's try something like that now on this layer mask we're just going to fill this with black temporarily because I want it to be invisible so I'm going to go to edit and down to fill and we're going to fill this with black okay so let's make our underlying layer visible and then I can paint with my brush tool here on this layer just where we want it to be visible and I think like a little bit of this color right up here at the top kind of looks cool all right and I'm just choosing a large soft edged brush to kind of like fade that in okay so let's go ahead and change this color I'm going to click on my hue/saturation adjustment layer click here on my properties and we're just going to edit our hue just a little bit to the left there cool so a nice subtle gradient on the top of the hair as well all right pretty cool so that's the idea with colorize basically load a hue/saturation adjustment layer click on that colorize button and then you can change one color to any color and again we used two layer masks on a single layer by grouping that layer with itself that way we have our perfect layer mask of just the hair and then we have a new way to define okay but I only want it to be visible in this part of the hair alright so let's take those same concepts and now and we're going to do the same thing with her eye makeup okay to start off I want to get this blue color here to be mirrored here in the eye makeup so the eye makeup looks basically like the hair so let's go ahead and find our layer here this is our hue/saturation adjustment layer set to colorize okay that's giving us the blue color now in this case what we're going to do is duplicate this hue/saturation adjustment layer so let's click and drag it to the new layer icon there we go and we're going to bring this all the way up to the very top we don't need this to be inside of the group because the group is telling it to only be visible right here okay so let's go ahead and bring this all the way up I'm just going to click and drag it all the way up to the very top you can see it's going to make everything visible now ok and now what we're going to do is click on our layer mask and we're going to fill it with black so let's go to edit down to fill and over to black and hit okay great and now basically I'm just going to use my brush tool to paint white here on the edge of the eye and we're using a large soft edge brush here there we go just adding that color in to this side and then we'll do the same thing on this side using a large soft edge brush now in this case the brush that we're using here you can see it's it's going to put a little bit of color like below the lid let's just turn this off and on okay you can see it is coloring below the lid as well and a little bit up there as well so if we want it to disappear simply paint black with your brush tool okay using a large soft edge brush here and then we're going to choose a smaller brush we're going to right click and just bring our size down and our hardness up a little bit and I'm going to paint black right below the bottom of that lid so you can see it's just zoom in to show you the before and after so here's the before and the after so we're just we're making it disappear from the bottom of the lid and right over top of the hair we don't want it to be visible there okay same thing here let's just go ahead and paint that here so it does not appear over the bottom of the lid okay so we're just coloring the outer edge of the eye pretty cool I think that looks great now let's do the same thing with this yellow color and then we're going to be done so here's our hue/saturation adjustment layer for the yellow color let's go ahead and duplicate that click and drag it to the new layer icon we're going to bring that to the top as well okay and you can see because we have our original layer mask in place it is in fact coloring all of the hair okay so let's click on my layer mask here we're going to go to edit down to fill and we're going to go ahead and fill that with black and then we're gonna use our brush tool thing with a large soft edge brush here on the left hand side and just bring in some of that nice yellow we'll do the same thing with this other eye as well I love the color eyes feature it's so cool you really can do some great effects especially for images like this that you know they kind of in this case it kind of lends itself to adding some color into the image because we did we started off with some so like really nice colored hair all right that looks great and I think this blue here we're just going to fade this away just a little bit so let's choose our soft brush here and I'm going to paint with black there we go just right over here we're going to have this just be visible towards the edges there alright and I'm using a flow of 40% here so it just it kind of puts it in really nice and softly it it doesn't do too harsh of an effect if I Flo was at a hundred percent okay and I painted white it would just look like that right but a flow down like 20 30 40 percent it's just going to like you can see it just kind of like barely puts it in there and you kind of have to work your way up on that alright cool and I think that looks great so let's go ahead and show you guys the before and the after here's our before and the after alright guys and that's all there is to colorizing your images in Photoshop if you want to do this yourself just follow these key steps first start off by making a selection around the area you'd like to colorize I suggest going to select and down to color range now you want to choose a fuzziness that's going to select mostly the area you want to select but if some of the background is selected that's okay too after making your selection go to layer down to adjustment layer and go to hue/saturation now it's going to load your selection automatically onto the layer mask to edit your layer mask hold alt or option and click on your layer mask in this example we use our brush tool set to an overlay blend mode that allowed us to paint white over the light areas and dark over the darker areas it keeps the whites and the darks separate once you have an accurate selection it's time to hit colorize in the hue/saturation adjustment properties window this way you can color one color into any color you can imagine we also showed you how to effectively use two layer masks on one layer by grouping the layer with itself and then adding a layer mask to that group that's what allowed us to color just the bottom of the hair and then with the duplicate just the top of the hair we use the same principle to color the eyes as well bringing in some of the blue and yellow into the eyes making it look like both the hair and the eyes fade with the same color range and that's all there is to it guys I hope you had fun learning how to colorize in Photoshop you can use this exact technique to color just about anything in a photo if you love photoshop & photography as much as I do go ahead and click on your screen right about now we'll send you free photoshop & photography episodes every single week and if you have an idea for an episode or a question or comment about today's episode please leave it in the comment box right down below I'd love to hear from you up thanks so much guys i'll phlearn you later bye everyone alright good job did it with our layer mask all right so do

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 394,673

Rating: 4.9486551 out of 5

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, color, coloring, coloring in photoshop, photoshop color, colors, editing color, edit color, change color, change color photoshop, manipulate color, fix color, fixing color, hair, cotton candy, woman, wig, color pop, stylize

Id: GD8WouIe9D8

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2016