Painting in color to a specific area

The great thing about using these hand coloring techniques, is that they give us a lot of flexibility. We can always change our mind, or customize the way we've worked with these different layers. And they also allow us to be creative in different ways. So here, let's talk about how we can further customize the color of this image. For example, let's say that rather than having the belt blue here, we want this to be a bit purple. Well one way that we can do this and affect this area is by making a selection and then creating and adjustment layer or sometimes you'll just want to go straight to creating that adjustment layer.

Let's do that. Click on the hue saturation adjustment layer icon and then click on Colorize. Next we can select the color, and I had mentioned I want to go perhaps with a purple here, and then what we need to do. Is we need to make sure that this color isn't affecting the entire image but only the belt. To do that we'll navigate over to the mask area of the properties panel and we'll click on the button for Invert. There's also a handy shortcut to invert your mask, it's Cmd+I on a Mac or Ctrl+I on Windows. So either by way of shortcut or by clicking on the button, invert the mask so that it's black.

That conceals the entire purple tint or colorize effect. Next grab your brush tool. Here with the brush tool selected we want to paint with white. We want to zoom in on the area of the photograph that we want to work with. And we want a nice soft and small brush and what I mean by having a small brush and a soft brush, is a small size here without any hardness. Then we'll just start to paint over this part of the picture. I'm going to make the brush a little bit bigger so I can paint this in. A little bit more quickly. And as you're working with hand painting, and hand tinting, and coloring, how detailed you go, or how quick you go really depends upon the project, and what you're doing.

And also how important it is. In this case, the belt is actually pretty important, because this is going to stand out. And these edges are going to be noticeable because the color is so different. So it's not just like, an area on the side of the photograph, but it's really, central area. Here, I'll paint with black to conceal some of the kind of spillover there; I painted too much color in in a few areas. And then, I'll paint with white to bring a little bit more in on a couple other spots, like the buckle here, and the edges of the buckle. Next, we want to zoom out after we broaden the color here, so, let me do a little bit more painting.

I'm almost done with that. Zoom out by pressing Cmd+Minus on a Mac, Ctrl+Minus on Windows. And, here we can see how we have this new colorized effect in that part of the image. I like to typically feather the edges that I've just made with that mask. sort of softens them so they blend in nicely. And then of course go back to the hue options here and change the overall saturation of the belt or the color. Now that you've actually painted it in, you made decide you know what it might work better to have kind of a darker blue color there, so we're just making that have a little bit more snap.

Or maybe a bit more of a green or a yellow. Really it depends upon the overall aesthetic that you want to accomplish. My case I'm going for a bit more of a pastel, watercolor look with this image. So, I'll bring that color saturation down and then chose a color which fits that overall aesthetic.