COLOURISING USING

PHOTOSHOP
GEORGE CHILVERS

COLOURISING USING PHOTOSHOP HOW I DO IT

To colourise monochrome pictures I use an old version of Photoshop (Photoshop 7). I think
that most later versions (and probably some earlier ones) have all the elements still in the
programme, but some of the names may be a bit different, and the layout and icons will have
altered.
To actually do this we're going to create adjustment layers, and then just paint on the colours.
The advantage of using adjustment layers is that they can be altered at any time even when
you think the picture is finished and someone comes along and says "that wasn't blue, it was
red". If things go really wrong you can backtrack with edit>undo or even edit>step
backwards, which takes you as far back as you like,
Adjustment layers are like sheets of clear coloured cellophane layered over the picture, and
cut to size for the particular element to be coloured.
We're going to colourise a picture of Pele with the World Cup if you want to try this with me
then you'll get it here (but you can use any picture of your own of course):
http://bestplayerintheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/pele-first-wc.jpg
Save the image on your PC and then with Photoshop running go to File>Open.

The first thing we're going to do is make sure there's no trace of colour in the image. There
are two main colour modes for pictures RGB (basically in colour) and grayscale (black and
white). Often even though a picture may appear to be monochrome there are little tints or
shades, so if (as in this photo) it is in RGB mode (on the blue title bar see where it says RGB
after the file name?) we'll convert it to grayscale to wipe out any colour, and then convert back
to RGB so we can add colour (you can't add colour to a grayscale image). Confused? We
haven't started yet.
So go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. You'll be asked if you want to get rid of the color profile,
click OK. In this picture there'll be little difference but in some you may see a difference.
Then go back to Image>Mode and click on RGB. Right, now we've got that sorted off we go
to work.
We're going to create a palette of colours to paint with. In this picture the principal colours will
be the yellow of the shirt, green for the trim, brown for the flesh tones, and light blue for the
sky. There's also gold for the cup.

Let's start with the yellow. I'll labour the point on this layer, but once you've got the principle
you'll be flying.
To select an area there are all sorts of different ways, and some instructional stuff on the
internet dealing with colourising use the most obscure and difficult ways of doing it. My
system is, I think, so much easier. We're going to use Quick Mask.
The easiest way to select Quick Mask is to hit the "Q" key. If you paint on the image now with
the paintbrush tool (key B) you'll see that it paints in red. What it is doing is masking areas
that you've selected, but you don't need to worry too much about how/why just what. So we
want to select an area that's going to be yellow and paint over the middle of the shirt area
(you don't need to worry about going up to the edges yet, we're just mixing the paint). You
can alter the size of the brush up and down with the "[" and the "]" keys (next to P). Just hold
the left mouse button down and wave the pointer over the area. You'll soon get the hang.
You can let go the button any time and then start again without losing what you've done.
You'll get something like this:

To turn this back to a selection hit the "Q" key again. You'll now get the "marching ants",
which indicates a selection. However, because this is a mask you have now selected
everything except what you want so go up to the select menu and click on inverse. This
will now select the area you have just painted.

We now
We now have to set this area up as being yellow, and we do this with an "adjustment layer".
Go up to "Layers" on the menu bar and select New Adjustment Layer and then
Hue/Saturation. You'll get a box showing "New Layer" and asking for a name. The default is
Layer 1, but we want something meaningful that we can identify later how about we call this
layer "yellow". Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it? So type in "yellow" for the name and hit
OK you then get another box popping up. This is headed Hue/Saturation and has three
sliders: hue, saturation and brightness. But all three are in the middle and nothing seems to
have happened. However if you click in the little box to the bottom right marked "colorize"
then things start to happen.
Depending on your setting of normal paint colour the area you've selected will go that colour.
In my case this is a strange tone of green and the sliders are at 135/25/0. It can be quite
amusing having green or purple faces.

Here's where we do the magic, if you move the hue slider to around the 30-45 mark the hue
changes to yellow. We can then play with the saturation slider as well low numbers reduce
the colour to a grey colour, high values produce neon like colours that can induce a

headache. Finally a tweak with the brightness. Now the important thing to know is that this
isn't necessarily the final setting. By using this method you can go back at any time and
adjust. For the moment I'm going to go with 32/32/-7. If we click OK we get this:

If you look at the bottom right of the Photoshop screen you'll see that under the tab "Layers"
are "Background" and "yellow". This is the start of your palette. Background is the source
greyscale image, and yellow is your paint pot for the yellow.
Now, it's up to you what you do next. You can either paint all (or most of) the yellow area.
Pick the brush tool (or hit "B") and drag the mouse over the area you want yellow. Use a hard
edged brush (one of the ones at the top of the pick list) we'll talk about fuzzy brushes later.
You can zoom in and out by using the slider in the Navigation box or "Ctrl +" or "Ctrl ", and
as said above you can alter the size of the brush with [ and ]. Personally I find using the
keyboard shortcuts easier, as I have left hand on the keyboard and right on the mouse/pen.
But it's up to you. What I do suggest is that you continually save your work as you go along
save as a .psd file for now. As you work on just hit Ctrl-S at regular intervals.
Another thing you should know is that you may find you go over the edges at times you can
undo a bit you've painted by hitting X and your brush will now act as an eraser. Again don't
worry too much about the fine finish yet get some colour down.

Looking at that the yellow is a bit pink for my liking, but I'll leave it at the moment. Because as
I said you don't even need to have finished all the yellow before you move on. As I'm
impatient I tend to set up most of my palette first. So let's set up the sky colour, and basically
we do the same process: Hit Q to set up Quick Mask, paint over a portion of sky area, hit Q
again to get a selection, inverse the selection and then create an adjustment layer named
"sky" in this case, and move the sliders. For this sky 200/24/+17 seems fine as a starter.

OK do you see where we're going now? We have our "paint pots" on the bottom right of
yellow and sky. Set up more without completing the sky layer there's the green trim and the
skin tones by setting up new adjustment layers "green" and "skin". As a starter I've used
139/30/-16 for the green and 23/19/-2 for skin. I must say here though that getting skin tones
right is by far the hardest thing in colourising. There just isn't a standard that can be applied
to all photos. It really is trial and error. For Caucasian skin start at 20 and move downwards,
but you will find that you'll also need to play around with the saturation far more than for other
areas of colour. It is a difficult balancing act. But nonetheless we end up with this:

We'll go up to the edges later, but let's get the cup onto our palette too. For metallic colours I
find that saturation needs to be increased while the brightness slider is upped as well for
this I've used 40/37/+4 for the gold.

So to recap we've now got a little palette of colours that we can paint with. As I said
above you can do all of each one as you set them up, and pretty well complete each layer,
but I like the feel of "painting" across the canvas using a full range of colours.
Fill in the gaps on each set of colour; just click on the name in the box at the lower right hand
corner of the screen to select a particular colour and paint away zooming in and out,
increasing and decreasing the size of the brush, and toggling the X key to paint or wipe away.
Let's fill in all the colours that we have set up so far select and paint. You don't have to stick
to one colour only if you are zoomed right in you can flick between colours at the boundary.
Remember to use X to toggle between painting and erasing.

Maybe you found that easy, but more likely you found it a bit difficult. Don't worry with more
practice you'll find it gets easier.
I'm going to introduce something new now that may help. It's the order of the layers. If you
look at the layers box you'll see (in my example anyway): gold, skin, grass, sky, yellow and
background. The simple rule is that higher layers cover lower ones. When we look at the
picture the sky is behind everything at no point would we want any slight smudges of sky to

encroach on any other colour. So let's move sky to the bottom of the pile so that effectively
it's behind everything else. The only thing below it is background, which is the black and
white image. It's in italics because it's anchored to the bottom of the stack. So click on the
word "sky" and holding down the mouse button just move it downwards below yellow. The
sky layer should now be at the bottom of your palette.
Let's now start with another new part. We're going to do the hair. Some people say why
bother as it's black anyway but I find adding a slight tone adds something to the finished
product. The same happens with black items (a low brightness blue) or white items (often a
low saturation yellow or blue depending on the light)
There are three things relevant here for hair one is that the saturation is way, way down
not zero but pretty near, secondly that we use a fuzzy brush to blur the edges (and we may
even use a new tool "blur" too), and thirdly we need the hair layer to be above the skin layer.
Right then at the top of the page you'll see (when the paintbrush is selected) a box marked
"brush" with a number (that relates to the size of the brush). Click the arrow at the side of the
number and a drop down menu appears with wavy lines - scroll up to the top. You'll see 1, 3,
5, 9, 13 and 19 but then the numbers start again: 5, 9, 13 These are the fuzzy edged
brushes and this is what we need now (and sometimes as you do more pictures you'll use
them often). The edges fade away at the outside of the circle. Select any one of the numbers
to set the brush type and then create a new adjustment layer for hair. I have used 13/7/0 as a
starting point. See how the saturation of 7 is low, but not zero.
Make sure that the hair layer is above the skin layer (as explained above) and using the fuzzy
edged brush area go over the hair as we don't want too sharp an edge. We also need to do
the lips and here I find 18/24/0 does fine. Fill in any missing skin areas as the skin layer
should be below hair and lips you should be able to be a bit cavalier with your brush strokes.
Let's see where we're up to now. Looking at the picture I said I think the yellow is a bit too
pink, and I'm not 100% happy with the green. So what can we do? Well we can alter the
colours fairly easily, because we have used adjustment layers.
Look at the layers "palette". Now on the yellow line we have an eye, an empty box then a box
with a greyed out graph with a little slider under it, then a chainlink, another box and the
name. Double-click the box with the graph and slider symbol, and hey presto the
hue/saturation/brightness box pops up again. We can alter that now seeing what happens
on the picture while we do it. This is really useful, as sometimes (OK- often) once you get
more colours in your original guesses need a tweak. So let's alter the yellow to 43/40/-7 and
while we're at it change the green to 139/28/-21. Much better, You can also use this if you
do a shirt blue and someone says actually it was red. You can alter the hue easily.
Are you now ready for another little bit of help? Because now we need the background doing,
and we can cheat a little here. Because on our palette we often have the colours we need (if
not then it's no problem to set any up) if we cheat a little.
For example for the roof of the building to the right if you select skin, but tone it down you get
a good result. And how do we tone it down? Have a look up at the menu bar which shows
the brush option. You'll see a box that says opacity 100%. Reduce that to 33% and now
paint over the roof area. See what happens a toned-down version is painted in.
Do the same for the lettering and the posters with toned down versions (opacity 33%
although you can use any variation, 50% is often good) of yellow, lips (gives a good pale red),
hair, skin and for the trees at the right green. I tend to use standard opacities of 25%, 33%,
50% etc mainly so I can remember them if I need to go back, but you can of ocurse use
anything between 0 and 100%.
The base of the cup will be fine with a 33% coating of "sky". You'll be surprised how versatile
the palette becomes. With just 7 colour adjustment layers you should end up with something
like this:

Save the image for the last time, and then if you're going to use it anywhere save as a .jpg.
And that's more or less it.
What is most important is that you practice, practice, practice. There are quite a few other
little techniques you'll learn, but these are the basics. You can learn about using the blur tool
by reading up on any Photoshop site, and this is a useful tool too for dealing with
backgrounds. You can add adjustment layers at the top of the stack for brightness and
contrast and, if you get technical, levels. You can reduce opacity and paint over a colour
lower down a low opacity brown can sometimes be dragged in parts over a higher opacity
grass layer to give a muddy effect.
But that's all for the future.
For now I have told you the equivalent of saying that to oil-paint you put paint onto a palette,
and spread it on the canvas. HOW you put it on and WHERE and in WHAT PROPORTIONS
is the hard part.
Only practice will help you get the hue, saturation and brightness right for every layer. The
edges at first may appear too sharp. There will be gaps and overpainted edges. Keep at it.
Don't underestimate the effect of backgrounds and how a few spots of fuzzy colour (toned
down maybe) in the background can make things look more "photo realistic".
Looking forward to seeing your efforts. But be warned this is highly addictive!!
Good luck, folks.
George Chilvers
February 2012