Black and white picture colorization
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- BaskerviIle0
I was looking for a good tutorial for this a while ago. I ended up painting over by eye, gradually layering up colours and then addidng in highlights and shadows to help things not look so flat. When you overlay colour onto the grey image things really flatten out.
All the tutorials I found were crap.Here was my attempt. A bit rubbish, could have spent longer on it. Tried to mimic the kind of oversaturated 60s photo look:
- ZOOP0
- pango0
There's no quick and realistic way. i've look everywhere... :(
I've done some i think was pretty good.
You need a good eye for colour (no shit)
I mainly use adjustment layer/Solid colour/overlay. and paint the mask in with brush. Then clip some more adjustment layer as you see fit.
oh and white is usually not completely white hue in a photograph. add a hint of whatever colour you see fit to make it more realistic.
- BaskerviIle0
I'd say that skin tones are by far the hardest to mimic.
I worked by overlaying (or multiplying) colour over the top of the greyscale image, You'll get a pretty flat result like this, so I then built up more translucent layers of colour, highlight, shadow etc over the top.
I tried to find similar images in colour to use as reference, but obviously a feel for what colours you want is important. It's quite fun imaging what colours you think should be in the image. since there is no guides to go from.Then once I'd got most things blocked in, I flattened the whole file and made overall adjustments to the colour, duplicated it on itself and made more adjustments. I also pulled the original b&w image back in at the end and used the original shadows from that to keep the image contrasty, since things had got a bit muddy.
One major tell-tale sign that an image has been colourised, is that the whole image looks very flat, there aren't enough highlights and the colours are typically quite desaturated. Hence going from a good source image will help you mimic colours well
I'd love to try this properly on a highres scan of an old B&W image, something from my family's history or something, so there was a reason to spend time on it.
You've probably seen them before, but some of these are amazing:
http://imgur.com/a/wapUe
- BaskerviIle0
Here's a challenge:
Use this image, and see where everyone gets to. Happy to share photoshop files etc, because this is something I've wanted to learn to do for a while. No rush, would just be good to return to this thread every so often and see where people get to. Like photoshop battle, but with a useful aim!
- !!!! CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!!!pango
- sweet! ps, I think the flag should be red white and blueBaskerviIle
- btw. was he black or white?pango
- those blacks are really dark...sine