Color Black & White Photo Using Photoshop

If we look 60 or 70 years back, mostly black and white pictures were taken through cameras and placed in albums as sweet memories. If we compared these days with today’s world things are changed. Now we take pictures through colored digital cameras, place them in or PCs or create an online photo album and access it from any part of the world. Lot of efficient image processing algorithms have made it possible image editing and retouching on an ordinary home computer.

Today we can our colorful memories more easily but still we have our old colorless memories in drawers or somewhere in store room as no one like those black and white pictures. Here comes Photoshop. In this tutorial I am trying to color the black and white pictures and make those memories more remember able.

First of all open a black and white picture in Photoshop. Just as I open this picture.




Now we work on the face of the picture. Select magic wand tool or just press “w”. After selecting this tool click on the face of the picture. Your picture will look like this.




Here now we will work on the Edit quick mask. Press this and your picture look like this



Now we use Erase tool and clean the face just as I clean the face in this picture.




Now Move back to Standard quick mask. You simply click on standard quick mask or just press “q”. After moving to standard mask the face of the picture will be selected. Here press ctrl + u and select the suitable colors for the face.





Check colorize on the right side of the above picture. Now apply same procedure on arms hair and dress. Select suitable colors for all portions. After applying color you get the results. Hope you like this tutorial.