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About this lesson
This is another great tutorial for learning how selections and the Blend If works. Use it for adding color to black and white images, or even for advancing your selection techniques in color images (using tone, rather than color)
Exercise files
There are no related exercise files for this lesson, or we cannot provide them due to copyright issues.
Quick reference
Topic
Take a black and white photo and add color. You will be surprised by the results.
When to use
This is another great tutorial for learning how selections and the Blend If works. Use it for adding color to black and white images, or even for advancing your selection techniques in color images (using tone, rather than color)
Instructions
Prepare the photo
- Drag in photo and change to CMYK image profile: Image Dropdown Menu: Mode: CMYK Color
- Press OK
Selecting from a black and white image
- Use quick selection tool to select the first area (example: the sky)
- Use Refine Edge option (in the Selection Dropdown menu)
- Use Black and White for fine tuning the selection
- Use Edge Detection for hair, fur, grass, or trees
- Confirm the selection
Add color to your selection
- From the layers panel click on the Adjusment Layer icon
- Choose Curves
- Adjust each color chanel (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) until you get desired color
Repeat process for section of the photo you want to add color to.
Tip
See the Magic Wand vs Quick Selection tutorial for tips on precise control of the selection tools.
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- 00:05 Hey everyone. I'm certainly one to appreciate a black and white photo from
- 00:08 time to time.
- 00:09 But sometimes it just need a splash of color. Let's go ahead and colorize a
- 00:13 black and white photo.
- 00:14 In Photoshop, the process of turning a black and white photo into color can be
- 00:19 a little bit tricky,
- 00:20 depending on the photo that you are working with. The adding color part is actually
- 00:24 quite simple,
- 00:24 the tricky part is the selection process. Without any color, the objects have a
- 00:29 tendency to blend in with each other.
- 00:31 This tutorial is meant to demonstrate the process
- 00:34 of adding color to a black and white photo. While the image I chose to use is a fairly
- 00:38 simple example,
- 00:39 this method will work on most black and white photos. Now, the one thing I always
- 00:43 do when I'm converting a black and white photo to color
- 00:45 is to convert it to a CMYK image. This will give me a little bit more control
- 00:50 over my colors,
- 00:50 and I've found that I have gotten better results using a CMYK image.
- 00:54 To do that, head up to the Image menu, down to mode and then choose ‘CMYK color’.
- 00:57 Now the fun begins.
- 01:01 Your task at this point is to create a selection of color that doesn't exist.
- 01:05 Whether it's the sky, the grass, or a shirt,
- 01:08 you need to use your imagination and knowledge of the world
- 01:11 to determine which objects have color, where they start, and where they end.
- 01:15 It can be a little bit tricky. Photoshop includes a variety of
- 01:19 selection methods that you can use during this step.
- 01:21 For a reserve of similar shade, the Quick Selection tool may work quite well.
- 01:25 Otherwise, try out the Lasso tools or the Pen tool. Those will help with the hard
- 01:29 to get areas.
- 01:30 Using my Quick Selection tool, all I'm going to do is drag my mouse
- 01:34 over top of the sky, which is nicely divided by the trees.
- 01:37 That should give me a pretty nice selection. Once the initial selection has been
- 01:41 made, it may be a good idea to refine its edges, especially if you're dealing
- 01:43 with hair or trees. Under the Select menu at the
- 01:47 top, Photoshop’s refine edge feature
- 01:48 is fantastic for dealing with those rough edges,
- 01:52 like trees and hair.
- 01:52 To see exactly what I'm dealing with, I'm going to select the
- 01:56 ’black-and-white view’ mode
- 01:57 and then I'm going to turn on ‘smart radius’ and crank my radius up to around 20 pixels.
- 02:02 This will tell Photoshop to get in those little crevices that you really can’t get
- 02:06 in with standard selection tools.
- 02:07 Now, when you accept your new selection, it's time to add color.
- 02:11 We're going to be using a curves adjustment layer, as it allows us to
- 02:14 individually edit each channel.
- 02:16 And by using adjustment layers, we’re able to edit the adjustment at a later time
- 02:20 if needed.
- 02:20 In your layers panel, click on the ‘adjustment layer’ icon at the bottom,
- 02:24 and then select curves. Because we had an active selection already,
- 02:28 your curves adjustment layer will automatically add a layer mask
- 02:31 that reflects that selection. Your properties panel above,
- 02:34 or you're adjustments panel in an earlier version of Photoshop, will
- 02:37 update to show the curves adjustment, where you can choose any of the channels to edit.
- 02:41 Each object in your image will require a different combination of curve adjustments.
- 02:46 For example, if I wanted a nice blue sky, I would probably start my cyan channel
- 02:50 and drag the curve up into the left just a little bit.
- 02:55 And then I would hop into my yellow channel
- 02:56 and drag the curve down into the right quite a bit more.
- 02:59 And that will give me a nice blue sky. At this point, I'm not going to go through the
- 03:03 process all over again,
- 03:04 so what I do is save my selections as channels.
- 03:07 So here we have the tree selection. What I'm going to do is, again, I can add a curves
- 03:12 adjustment layer.
- 03:13 Now to get the green in the trees, I'm going to start my cyan channel again,
- 03:17 bring it up and to the left just a bit. I'm going to keep the magenta the same.
- 03:21 And in the yellow, I'm going to go up into the left a little bit.
- 03:24 That'll give me some nice green trees.
- 03:26 And finally, let me load in my field selection, and let's add one more curves
- 03:30 adjustment layer.
- 03:31 For this one, in cyan, I'll drag it down to the right a little bit.
- 03:35 Magenta is going to be a little bit up. And the yellow I'm going to drag up as well.
- 03:39 Once all the curve adjustments are in
- 03:42 you should have a nice looking result. But to really drive it home,
- 03:45 what I like to do is I like to add a hue and saturation adjustment layer as well.
- 03:49 Once this adjustment layer's been added, I'm going to crank the saturation up to give
- 03:53 some nice color to the image.
- 03:54 And finally, adding another curves adjustment layer to the whole image
- 03:58 should help sharpen up the final result.
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