Surely many of us in our home archives were filled with real rarities of photographic art. Many of these photographs depict the story of your family, which automatically makes them virtually priceless. But the trouble is: over time, the surface of the paper begins to turn yellow, the gloss is cracked, and the image is irreparably damaged.
Of course, the family history can be scanned, but how to make a color photograph from black and white in this case? In fact, everything is not so complicated.
If you at least understand something in computer graphics, you have probably guessed that we will use the world-famous program Adobe Photoshop. By the way, in this regard, we want to say a few words about the “specialists” of various centers of photography who, when addressing them with such a problem, are ready to spend hours on lectures on how to make a color photograph from black and white.
Naturally, at the same time, they will portray themselves as almost hackers, pushing the price of the issue to heaven. Do not believe them: if you wish, you can easily perform this operation, spending only a little of your time on it. We warn you that all the actions described below work in program versions 5.5 and higher.
So, first we need a scanned black and white photo. If you don’t have one, and you just want to practice a little, you should take any image and use the Shhot + Ctrl + U hot shot. So you convert the image to Grayscale, but then it will need to be converted to RGB again. Before you make a color photo from black and white, do not forget to create a new layer. This is done using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + N.
Having dealt with such a crucial matter, you need to decide on the detail of the image that you are going to colorize. To give it color, a brush is taken (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 most optimal. Keep in mind that you can’t get the photo from black and white to color from the first time, as this requires a certain skill that is developed only during practical exercises.
Having finished work with a brush, you can proceed to the final stage. In particular, for this you need to change the blending mode for the layer you are using. Suppose you can choose Darken (to create a dimming), as well as Soft Light, with which the colors and shades become softer and a little more muted. Performing all of the above actions on different parts of the image several times, you can make a photo of black and white gamut a bright color picture.
Note that this is not all coloring methods. So, in older versions of Photoshop, you can take advantage of the adjustment layers. They are good because they don’t change the photo directly, so you can return to the original look at any time. To use them, go to the Saturation menu. In this case, the Colorize mode must be active. After that, you can replace the parts of the image you need with the appropriate colors.
We hope that from our article you learned about how to make a color photograph from black and white. As you can see, there is nothing complicated about it!