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Colorizing Black-And-White Photos—06/14/10

Using Photoshop to create a classic hand-painted effect

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If you’re an ancient Gen-X-er like me you probably remember when billionaire media mogul Ted Turner began colorizing classic black-and-white films from Hollywood’s golden era. Even if you agree with critics who claimed this colorization amounted to “cultural vandalism,” there’s no doubt the technique is interesting and has its merits—especially for photographers. It’s a lot like the hand-tinting of black-and-white portraits that was popular in the early 20^th century, but it’s done digitally. If Mr. Turner can do it with movies, why shouldn’t photographers use similar tools to colorize their favorite black-and-white pictures, too? They can, and thankfully the technique is fairly straightforward. Whether you want to re-colorize digital captures to create a unique visual style, or if you’d like to add color to black-and-white film photos from the family archive, now you can become your own Ted Turner—minus the billions—by following these simple steps to digitally colorize black & white photos.

- Start with a simple black-and-white digital image, whether scanned from an old print or a desaturated digital capture, and choose one without a lot of multicolored fine detail. (Once you’re an expert, apply your skills to ever more detailed images to up the wow factor of the technique.) I chose a portrait of a friend photographed on black-and-white large format film.

- Working with Photoshop, first ensure the image file is desaturated but in the RGB color space. Create a new empty layer on top of the black-and-white original and, with the lasso tool, select a large area that will primarily be one color—say, a face in a portrait which will be the skin tone, or a tree in a landscape photo that will mostly be green. Once you’ve made a fairly accurate selection, save it in case you’d like to return to it later and then feather it a few pixels just to soften the edges.

- Now it’s time to fill the selection with the appropriate color. For skin tones, I usually make selections with the eyedropper tool from other color photos of people whose skin tones are appropriate. If the skin tone in another image seems similar to the look you want, select the color with the eyedropper and use the fill tool to place it in the selection area of your black-and-white image.

- When the color fills in the new layer it will be opaque, but we want it to apply the color and allow image detail to show through. You might think adjusting the layer options to “color” would be the best approach, but actually choosing “overlay” mode tends to produce the ideal result. Select overlay on the painted layer in the layers palette and watch as the image details emerge from the layer below. Part of your picture is now colorized.

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