Colorizing a Black & White photograph

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to colorize a black & white photograph. The trick is to select a particular area of an image with a similar shade of color and then colorizing that area using color range. Start by opening any B&W image that you want to colorize.

Use magic wand tool (W) to select one range of color.

Press shift and with magic wand, click on more areas to add to your selection.

You can smooth out the selections by appling feather (Ctrl + Alt +D)

From image menu select adjust>>color balance (Ctrl + B). In color balance window drag color sliders to achieve the color of your choice.

You can see that selected portion is changed from B&W to colored without compromising on the texture.

Similarly we selected areas of tree and colored these areas to green.

We selected doors and color them red in a similar way. Your output depends upon your quality of selection. Finer the selection, better the output.

Similarly make the clouds blue using color range.

After you are done with colorizing all portions, enhance the image a little bit by adjusting saturation values. Select Image>>adjustments>>hue saturation.

Increase saturation to enhance the color quality of the image.

Our B&W image is converted to a colored one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 1st, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Photoshop Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.