This simple Photoshop tutorial will cover how to turn a selection in a black and white digital photo into a colored area.Click on images to view details.

Last week, we looked at how to simply turn a colored digital image into black and white while maintaining colors in a specific selection. This week, we will be doing the opposite by simply turning a selection in a black and white photo into a colored selection.

We will start off with this black and white image of my cousin Jeeda (tip: you can easily turn a colored image into instant black and white by pressing “Shift+Ctrl+U”). I am going to attempt to color Jeeda while leaving the area around her intact, so first I will start by tracing every part of Jeeda that requires a different color (like skin, shirt, jeans, etc.).

Let’s start off with Jeeda’s skin, which should be beige-ish. Grab any of the selection tools (I would recommend the polygonal lasso tool, press L to select it), and start off by selecting Jeeda’s skin. After you have her face, neck and hands outlined, duplicate the selected area into a new layer via copy (Layer-> New-> Layer via Copy or press “Ctrl+J”.

Select the layer with the skin, bring up the Hue/Saturation window(Image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation or press “Ctrl+U”). Check the “colorize” option in the Hue/Saturation window, and play with the adjustments until you get the desired color.

To capture more realilistic colors, you may use the Image-> djustments->Brightness/Contrast option after you colorize the selection.

After you achieve the desired color, go back to the background layer and select the other color areas and repeat the same step we did with the skin. Let’s now select the shirt and the socks, which I want to turn to pink, and repeat the same process

In the end, you should have various colored layers including eyes, shirt, and jeans, something like this:

The end result:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 2:37 pm and is filed under How To, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.