From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Colorizing a black and white photo in Photoshop

Colorizing a black and white photo in Photoshop

From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Colorizing a black and white photo in Photoshop

A friend got this cool peel-apart Polaroid as a birthday gift, so we've been playing with it. So, I've ended up with all of these black and white prints. And because it's a peel, because it's a very old camera the, the prints are pretty grungy. So I've got what looks like a nice antique photo, but there's a whole other realm of antique that I can go, which is the hand colored look that people used to do before colored prints. People would take black and white photos and, using a very particular type of tint, they would actually just paint color onto images. What was cool about doing that was that you didn't actually have to know how to paint. It was really like a coloring book. All you had to do was get color into the right place and the tonality that was already there would do the rest for you because the tints weren't opaque. The tonality in the image could show through the tint and so you'd end up with these very soft pastelie-like hand colored images. I am going to do that here…

Contents