Colorizing a Black and White Photo Using Adobe Photoshop Elements

In this segment, we’re going to color an old vintage black and white photo. First, in the folder containing the practice files, let’s open both of these images up. One is a color swatch I created to apply the colors just to make it easy. All you have to do is use the Color Picker tool to pick the color rather than enter the values in manually. So let’s pick this, the flesh color. And then the brush tool. And then on the layer labeled face, let’s start applying the color.

I’d like to work along the edge first. Starting with the hairline, then working around the ears and then the jaw line, and then when all the colors added, it will temporarily switch the blend mode to normal, you’ll see that there’s some gaps and holes that need to be filled in. So we’ll do that now. We’ll fill those areas in, zoom in as you need to cause some of those areas will be small, and we’ll fill that in and get a nice even tone.

Now, let’s switch back to the colorblend mode. Once that’s done, let’s lower the layer opacity to about 80%. That looks about right for a hand tinted photo. You can go slightly up or down a little bit depending on your taste, I think that looks right for me though. Next, let’s select the hair color. And on the layer titled hair, we’ll start applying the color.

So a lot of contour and fly away areas in the hair, so you want to be sure and zoom in and really take your time in these areas. It’s OK to work slowly, just take as much time as you need, and get along the where you can see here. Where the curly part of the hair is. Once you fill the hair in, like before, we’ll temporarily switch to the normal wind mode, and fill in the gaps.

But you might notice signed it up with somewhat of a large gap between the hair and the face. So if that happens to you, if you end up with that result, just take a small, soft brush and fill the gap in. Now, once the hair’s complete, we’ll switch the blend mode back to color and lower the opacity to about 35%. That should give it a natural hand tinted look.

Now, for the lips we’ll pick the red color from the color swatch, and on the layer that’s titled, lips, will start applying the color. And we can see it’s a very bright red but it’s not he won’t stay that way for long. After that color supply, we’ll switch to the normal blend mode, and I had to move the layer up to the top of the stat to be able to see everything.

Weren’t really any gaps, so I’ll go ahead and lower the opacity to about 40%. Notice I went over the edge a little bit here, so using the eraser tool, went ahead and clean that up. Hopefully, you won’t have to. For the cheeks, we’ll use the same res we did with the lips, and use a large, soft brush. We’ll just fill in, making her look like she’s got some Rouge.

And then lower the opacity to about 60%, where you can see it, but it’s not overpowering. For the sweater, we’ll pick the pink color, and on the layer titled, sweater, we’ll start adding the color. Working them along the edge first, as I like to do. After the sweater’s colorized, we’ll switch the blend mode back to color and lower the opacity to about 40%.

Last thing to do are the eyes. Let’s pick the blue from the color swatch and fill in the iris of each eye and lower the opacity to about 35%. Maybe 30%. We don’t want it overpowering. Now, we have the before and after comparison. As we can see, Photoshop Elements is a great program to colorized those old black and white images.