Hand coloring the dress

In a previous movie, we convert our image to black and white. And we added some color in the background. In this movie, we're going to begin to add color to other areas of our photograph, as well. Yet, before we do, what you want to do before you move on to the next step, is you want to zoom in on the picture. Press Cmd + on a Mac, or Ctrl + on Windows. And zoom in and just look around at the edges, press the space bar key and click and drag to move around. If you notice a mistake area, for example, like the earrings here, they shouldn't be pink. What you want to do is click into the mask, grab your brush tool, and here we can paint away that color by painting with black.

So choose black as your foreground color. Next, for your brush size, you're going to need a really small brush for this area. For the opacity setting, I like to bring this down somewhere below 50%. Because that allows me to paint in a little bit more of a subtle way. Think of this as if you were actually painting, because you're not going to bring in all the color at full intensity right away. Again, this just allows you to clean things up a little bit. Now, if you need to bring in more pink, we'll just paint with white. And that way, you can bring in some pink into some of the areas, perhaps, where it wasn't quite close enough to the edge there on that selection.

All right, well next let's work on another area of the photograph. Here we'll zoom out. Let's begin to work on the dress. To work on that area, let's make a selection by navigating to the background layer, click in that layer in the layers panel. Then choose the Quick Select tool by pressing the w key or by clicking on the Quick Select tool, here in the tools panel. Then zoom in on the image, or zoom in on the area you're working on. And what we want to do, is just begin to click and drag over the area that we want to adjust. In this case, the dress.

So we'll go ahead and click and drag over that area. As you're building this selection up, what you want to do is pay attention and make sure that you aren't selecting anything that you don't want to select. Invariably, what will happen is, as you're building up the selection, for example when you work down here, is it will select the arms and hands as well. Especially because it thinks that you want to connect this area. Well to crack that, hold down the Option key on Mac, Alt on Windows and just click and paint over the areas that you don't want to select.

In this case, the hands and also a little bit of the background there. And keep in mind as well, if it doesn't work out perfectly, we can always go back and fix this up with a technique that I just highlighted, which was to paint on the mask, which I'll show you in just a moment. All right. Well, so far so good. We have a rough selection here. Next, let's go to Refine Edge. Now you can find that option up in the Options bar there. And we want to click on that and turn on Smart Radius, increase that, smooth those edges out a little bit and add a touch of feather as well.

Then click OK. Well, now that we have a nice selection, I want to show you another technique for hand coloring an area of your photograph. Here we'll click in the topmost layer, but rather than using selective color, what we're going to do is use hue saturation. Click on the hue saturation icon. And rather than using the hue slider, because you'll notice this won't do anything at all. What we're going to do, is turn on colorize. Colorize allows you to add color to your photograph and you can see how we can add different colors. Let me zoom out, so you can kind of see how that fits into the overall picture.

And you can have some fun with this. You can create a saturated or a really faint color. And sometimes it's fun to have a nice subtle color in there. And I'll just try to choose something which might work well for our little project here. All right, well after we've done that, we need to zoom back in and focus in on those edges. If we go down to this area, you'll notice that there are some problems. So here I'll fix those by selecting the brush tool. Here we can paint with white, we'll paint with a little bit of a lower opacity. And we're on our mask here and if we paint with white at a lower opacity, for example, in this area, you can see how I'm bringing in the blue into this area that wasn't selected.

And again, I just like to use a lower opacity because it helps you to sort of build up that color and also allows you to be, perhaps a bit more precise, so that you're not moving so fast. Because sometimes when you're working with color, you can add too much and it will just look a little bit strange. This allows you to build up some of those transition areas around those edges. Now paint with black in order to conceal or hide the color for some areas. I need to get rid of it off the fingernail there. And then there'll be some other areas as well. Like on this hand here, that doesn't look very good.

I'll just paint back and forth. Now right now I'm using a mouse just because that's what I happen to have at the moment, although if you have a Wacom tablet, that would be great because then you could use the control of that stylus pen to really paint in with precision. Yet either way, you can seen that you can accomplish decent results by painting on that mask and by beginning to add some color to that area of the photograph. All right, well so far so good, we've been adding some good color to this picture, we obviously have some more ground to cover.

So go ahead and keep this image open, as we'll continue to work on it, in the next movie.