How to make a color photo from black and white: tips for beginners

Surely many of us in the home archives were covered with real rarities of photographic art. Many of these photos depict the history of your family, which automatically makes them virtually invaluable. But the trouble is: over time, the surface of the paper begins to turn yellow, the gloss crackles, the image irretrievably deteriorates.

Of course, the family history can be scanned, but how to make a color photo from black and white in this case? Actually, everything is not so difficult.

If you understand anything in computer graphics, you probably figured out that we will use the world-famous Adobe Photoshop program. By the way, in this connection I want to say a few words about the "specialists" of the various photo centers who, when addressing them with such a problem, are willing to spend hours on lectures on how to make a color photo from black and white.

Naturally, they themselves are almost hackers, raising the price of the question to the skies. Do not believe them: if you wish, you can easily perform this operation, having spent only a little time on it. We warn that all the below described actions work in the versions of program 5.5 and higher.

So, first we need a scanned black and white photo. If you do not have one, and you just want to practice a little, then take any image and use the Shift + Ctrl + U hot shots. So you convert the image to Grayscale, but then it will have to be translated again into RGB. Before you make a color photo from black and white, do not forget to create a new layer. This is done by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N.

Having dealt with such a responsible business, you need to decide on the detail of the image that you are going to color. To give it a color, take a brush (Brush). It should be noted that to get the best result you need to use not a mouse, but a graphic tablet, with which the accuracy will be the most optimal. Please note that it is not the first time you can translate a photo from black and white into color, since for this you need a certain skill that is developed only in practical exercises.

Having finished the work with a brush, you can proceed to the final stage. In particular, for this you need to change the blend mode for the layer you are using. Suppose you can choose Darken (to create a blackout), as well as Soft Light, with which the colors and hues will become softer and slightly more muted. Performing all the above-described actions on different parts of the image several times, you can make a photo of a black and white gamut a bright color picture.

Note that this is not all the ways of coloring. So, in older versions of Photoshop, you can take advantage of the corrective layers. They are good because they do not directly change the photo, so you can return to the original view at any time. To use them, go to the Saturation menu. In this case, the Colorize mode must be active. After this, you can replace the required parts of the image with the appropriate colors.

We hope that from our article you learned how to make a color photo from black and white. As you can see, nothing is complicated in this!