Photoshop Tutorial: Adding Color That Wasn't There to a Black and White Picture

[mzwebfreak 0]

Taking a note from my previous tutorial, here's how to have color in a black and white picture that may not have been there to begin with.

 

1. Take any graphic you want; the simpler, the better.

 

2. Go to the Layers tab, right click, and choose Duplicate Layer

(You'll get a message asking what you want to name the layer and where you want it. Just press OK to go with the default.)

 

 

3. Go to the Image Section in the top area, select Adjustments, then Desaturate.

4. You now have two choices- Background and Background Copy...click on Background to go back to that layer.

 

5. Once back on the background picture, (which you'll know because the picture changes from black and white back to color), go to the Image Section, select Adjustments again, then Hue/Saturate.

6. Now, you can choose any kind of color you want, but to make it easier to see how it'll look, you need to click on the Colorize button on the Hue/Saturation tool box.

(As you can see, the specifications I put in put the saturation as deep red.)

 

7. Click back to the Background Copy section, and erase as much or as little as you want to show off this color...I erased enough to emphasize the red lips.

 

 

 

Voila! Finished Product:

[szupie 0]

Hmm, can you show me the original picture, before it was colored?And what does the "Desaturate" step do? Does it smooth the image out? That's what it looks like in the colored picture, so that's why I guessed that.

[abhiram 0]

uh... isn't this the same as making a part of the pic colored and the rest of it black and white? You are using a colored picture to begin with. I think this is the same as this post:

http://forums.xisto.com/topic/86311-topic/?findpost=1064320484

except that you are changing the color of the original pic and then erasing the overlapping black and white image.

[mzwebfreak 0]

It's similar, Abhiram, but it has quite a few different steps from my first tutorial...as for Desaturate, what that key does is remove all color. What I was trying to do with these two tutorials, is show how to shows some color in a black and white photo that WAS there, as was in the post you mentioned, but this tutorial is about showing color that never was in the original graphic.

[austiniskoge 0]

I was having a lot of trouble with this before. I scan hand-drawn pictures that are in black ink, and then I would want them to be color.I tried this method, but to no avail. I may have been doing it wrong, or maybe it's just messed up. I have no idea.Short version: I use the Fill Color Bucket tool. It's like fill color in Paint, but it's not Paint! It took me forever to figure out that you have to hold the click over the tool icons to get the rest of the tools :)But when I finally found out, I rejoiced the fact that Photoshop has Fill Color! It seemed like the most basic thing any graphics program should have, but I really couldn't find it until recently.

[iGuest 3]

I need help!!!Photoshop Tutorial: Adding Color That Wasn't There

I downloaded some pictures off the internet to change and they were black and white in the beginning...So when I took them to photoshop to add some splashes of color it wouldn't let me!

I even tried using the original and old school Paints program and it turned the red I was going to paint on to gray! It is so frusterating, I went everywhere online and all I could find were things to show you how to change a color picture black and white and to add color to those...And even the hue/saturation doesn't work...The option along with color balance is gray and unavailable...Even creating a new layer doesn't work...Please help me?

-question by Rico