
Home

Colorizing a Black and White Photo

The following tutorial will demonstrate the simple process of taking a black and white photograph and colorizing it. This is especially useful for anyone who would like to update their old photographs in their scrapbooks.

1. Open your Black and White photograph in Photoshop.

2. Click the "Edit in Quick Mask Mode" toggle button to enter Quick Mask Mode (or press Q).
3. Select a brush size appropriate for the size of your photograph. Choose Black as your foreground color.
4. Paint the area that you want to color. The paint will be a transparent red. This indicates where you are painting the mask.

5. For the face in this tutorial, I painted everywhere that was skin, so that I can add the color of the skin to the face.

6. Click the "Edit in Standard Mode" toggle button (or press Q).
7. Goto Select > Inverse.
8. The area that you want to color should now be selected.

9. Goto Image > Adjustment > Color Balance...
10. Adjust the sliders to get the color that you want.

11. Click OK and you should now have the selected area colorized.

12. Follow Steps 2 thru 11 for the other parts of the photo that you want to color.
13. Below I selected and colored the lips:

14. Then I selected and colored the eyes:

15. When you are done selecting and coloring every part of your black and white photo, you will have a colorized photograph!