B&W to Colour ?

Awais Yaqub

How to do that i have seen some restored movies and also heard about pictures
can it be done in photoshop CS 8 ?:scratch
thanks

macaddict

This is my first attempt at colorizing a black and white photograph in Photoshop. It took a couple of hours, but I am happy with the way it turned out. I found a 48-star U.S. flag on the Internet and used it for a background. Believe it or not, I mapped my skin color from a photo of me over Dad's face!
Specifics: Open your B&W and a color photo. Duplicate your B&W background on its own layer (CMD+J) On the color photo make a selection around the desired skin tone. Back to the B&W. Choose Image>Adjustments>Match Color. You'll have the option of choosing your selection from the color photo. Adjust to your liking. Add a layer mask, clean it up and repeat with more layers and target colors. It takes a while, but it works!

Here's my brothers and sister way before I made my appearance!


Dave

Awais Yaqub

Thank you very much you did great job with those photos ! i will try your method

edgework

macaddict wrote:

This is my first attempt at colorizing a black and white photograph in Photoshop. It took a couple of hours, but I am happy with the way it turned out. I found a 48-star U.S. flag on the Internet and used it for a background. Believe it or not, I mapped my skin color from a photo of me over Dad's face!
Specifics: Open your B&W and a color photo. Duplicate your B&W background on its own layer (CMD+J) On the color photo make a selection around the desired skin tone. Back to the B&W. Choose Image>Adjustments>Match Color. You'll have the option of choosing your selection from the color photo. Adjust to your liking. Add a layer mask, clean it up and repeat with more layers and target colors. It takes a while, but it works!
Dave

Since you're already going to the trouble of making masks for each area, and you have a color image for your source tones, you might want to explore the power of gradient maps to capture the shifts in hue and saturation as you move from highlights to shadows. A single color can't really shake a BW image free from it's grayscale roots, particularly in the shadows. A gradient can incorporate the unique tones in all areas of the spectrum and they can then be position withing the specific image to maximize detail. They have the added advantage of being fully editable themselves, or responding to a curve adjustment layer as if they were pure pixel information, so they can be fine-tuned quite effectively.