Adding Color to Black and White Photographs

I shot my project in black and white film, so this week I decided to look up a tutorial on how to add your own colors to a picture.  If you also shot black and white pictures, or if you’d just like to re-color a photograph, then you can change your photograph to black and white, and then choose your own colors.  This would be a good idea if you’d like to take the colors from another picture and apply them to other photographs to make a set.

Here is the link to the tutorial, or if you are in a library without headphones, then here are the written steps:

1.  Double click your layer and name it.

2.  Add a new layer, and using your paintbrush tool, located on the left side of the window, choose a color from the swatches or styles under COLOR.  You can also use your eyedrop tool to use colors from a different picture.

3.  To change the size, manipulate the brush size at the top of the page.

4.  Like a coloring book, color over the parts of the picture that you’d like to change.  It doesn’t have to be perfect since we will can choose a style and opacity, and you can always use the eraser tool to touch up areas of color that aren’t quite in the lines.  You’ll see in the tutorial that the artist colors right over Audrey’s eyes.  In the layers window, right above your second layer, change the dropbox that says NORMAL to COLOR.  You can play around by scrolling through some of these options.  Hue works well for coloring eyes, and luminosity for lighter, more subtle color changes, and COLOR BURN for more saturated colors.  You can also change the opacity of your colors by changing the percent of opacity in the layers window.

5.  Use a different layer each time you change color so you can manipulate each part of the picture, changing the style and opacity according to your artistic vision!  Be sure to SAVE AS in case you want to color the image a different way later.