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Colorizing in Photoshop 6.0:

After a brief inspection of these flowers here, it seems there is nothing one could do to make this photo [flower1] any better. However it is a perfect candidate for colorizing the petals and B&W (grayscale) the rest. There are two reasons. First, the more bright the color the better the colorize looks; and second, having one article of clothing or one object of interest is what is important about colorizing.

Colorizing in Photoshop 6.0
(you can click on the individual tiles in this image to view full-size examples)

Step 1: Crop it and duplicate the image so you have two open copies.(The little (...) button in the history tab.)

Step 2: B&W one of the open versions. The most common error I've seen is people just discarding the color info. This is inaccurate as PS doesn't know from which channel to extract the gray values. So use the channel mixer set to monochrome. The values for a good place to start are R-40 G-40 B-40. The lower you drop the red value and increase the other two, the more wet the textures will look.[flower2]

Step 3: Now here, many people just grab the airbrush and set it to COLOR with bright Purple. You end up with something like this[flower3] OUCH! Something is wrong. Number one the color is too rich and number two it's not even close to the actual color. So to get it right, select the other open version of the flowers that is still colored. Enter Quick Mask mode and sloppily paint(select) the areas of color (petals) with the paint tool or airbrush. Come out of quick mask and COPY the dress into RAM.

Step 4: Then paste it into the B&W image. It may not line up so just drop the opacity of the layer and move it to get it lined up. You end up with this [flower4]. The benefits are that you can now erase at will the green areas that you don't want colored and now if you want to change the color with Hue/Saturation you can.

Step 5: Also to keep the color from being too rich, simply drop the opacity to taste. Like so [flower5].

That's it. This method is also useful for changing the color of something as well as colorizing. If you have comments or questions email me here. dinubila@home.com

Mark DiNubila
Graphic Artist

The Design Center and Photoshop Tips & Tricks sends out a warm thanks to Mark for sending in this tutorial. If you have a technique to share, just let us know!

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