Colorize Black and White Photos
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ONCE, THE WORLD WAS BLACK AND WHITE. Created by MGM for The Wizard of Oz (a film cruelly overlooked at the Oscars in favor of Gone With the Wind, which invented wind), color wouldn’t become mainstream technology until halfway through the 20th century, and even then pockets of resistance lingered, where people refused to install the relevant upgrades, claiming that monochrome was good enough, and that they didn’t trust the free update not to give their eyes typhoid.
Pity the PC owner in this world of perpetual twilight. The twinkling LEDs in his keyboard could only show shades of gray, Hercules made all graphics cards (they were fairly high res though), and people weren’t really certain about dithering. Artifacts of this time still exist in the form of black and white photos, but we can bring them into the present with a little image editing. Colorizing a mono photo can never bring back the true colors from the moment it was taken, but it can have a charming look all of its own. 1 CHANGE COLOR FORMAT Open your image file in Photoshop. If you’ve scanned a black and white photo or photographed it, you’ve probably got a file that uses the RGB color format, which means each pixel is defined by values of red, green, and blue. We’re going to change this to CMYK, the format used in printing things like this magazine, for no other reason than we were messing around with the file, and we discovered it works better this way. Head to “Image > Mode > CMYK color” [ Image A] and make the change—nothing should happen to your image, but the color format information up by the file name alters.
2 CREATE A SKIN TONE Now we’re going to create the colors that will be used in the image. First, go to the History palette, and create a new snapshot of your original image. To do this, right-click the most recent History state (probably “CMYK color”), and select “New Snapshot.” Select “Merged Layers” from the drop-down, give it a name (such as “Original”), and click “OK.” Now, on the right of Photoshop’s interface, you should find the Channels palette. If it’s not there, open it from the Window menu. In the palette, select the Cyan channel, and select a “Brightness/Contrast” adjustment from the Adjustments palette (find it in the Window menu if it’s not visible). Use this to brighten the channel and increase its contrast, and hopefully you should get something resembling a skin tone (we’re assuming that your photo has a person in it, because these are the most common subjects for the colorization treatment). Close the window when you’re done. 3 MAKE MORE COLORS Create a new snapshot just as you did in step two, and call this one “Skin.” You’ll see the snapshots stack up above the History palette as you work. Next, create some colors that would be appropriate for the other objects and areas in your photo. We’re going to make them for the gentleman’s suit, his hair, his sweater, and a general background color, but you can make as many as you need. To do this, we’re going to use the Adjustments palette again, but this time using the “Color Balance” adjustment, the icon for which looks like a tiny pair of scales [ Image B]. When you open it, you’ll find color sliders that are paired off, so you can slide them between cyan and red, for example, or yellow and blue. 4 COLOR EACH AREA Look at the area you want to color, and mess with the sliders until it’s the hue you want, or at least an acceptable color if finding the exact shade is proving difficult. You’ll notice that your changes affect the entire image, changing the skin tone color you created earlier, but this doesn’t matter. When you’ve finished, create another new snapshot, naming it appropriately. Go on to do this for every color you want to use. Planning ahead is essential at this stage, because it’s tricky to come back later and create a new color without undoing a lot of your work. It’s worth making sure that the snapshot with the largest areas of coloring on is created last, because this saves time.
5 USE THE HISTORY BRUSH TOOL The next stage requires a steady hand and can take some time. We’re going to use a paintbrush tool to merge all the snapshots we created into one image, making sure the colors go in the appropriate places. Thanks to the mono nature of our source, the shading is taken care of for us—we just have to make sure we don’t paint over the edges too much. Select the newest snapshot in the stack, usually the one at the bottom, and make sure that you’ve selected an image layer in the Layers palette, and not an adjustment layer. Back in the History palette, click the checkbox at the side of one of the other snapshots—it should appear like a brush with an arrow next to it; this is the History Brush tool.
6 START PAINTING Now, as you paint, the colors from the checked layer should be painted on to your selected layer [ Image C]. Paint in short bursts, so you can use Ctrl-Z to undo any mistakes you make, and use a selection tool to help you stay in the right area if you need to. Feathering the edge of the selection (Shift-F6) by a few pixels [ Image D] can create a soft border between colors if it’s looking a little harsh. Make sure you save repeatedly as you go, and it can be worth creating extra Full Document snapshots as you work, because the History Brush process can do strange things to your History palette.
7 FINISHING TOUCHES This can be a painstaking process, but it’s worth doing for a result you can proudly present to an aged relative. When you’ve finished, save the layers as a PSD file, then flatten it, convert back to RGB, and export as a JPEG ready for printing.