Are you a clumsy person like myself, constantly messing up your camera settings and end up with black and white/sepia photos? (you don’t accidentally drop iPods from a 3rd floor balcony too, do you?). Do you look at your granparents old black & white photos and wonder how they’d look like in color? Or perhaps you’re about to redecorate your flat and wonder how those new colors you chose for the walls match your furniture. If you answered yes to any of those questions and don’t have/want to use photoshop then this tutorial is for you.

Art geeks and photoshop gurus would shrug their shoulders or cry foul at such a thought, but many of us don’t have access to photoshop or lack the training or patience to use it. (note: If you’re an art geek you might be interested in Roba’s Photoshop version).

For this tutorial/software review, we’re going to use a software called “Recolored”. Recolored is brush stroke based recolorization software that mixes sophisticated algorithms and users brush strokes to colorize objects. It works on both colored and greyscale images, is quite inexpensive and very simple to use. Before you continue you will need to download the 21 days trail version.

For this tutorial we’re going to be using a friend’s flat photograph, it looks quite boring with loads of grey and white everywhere.

Step 1: Convert the image to grayscale by selecting image > greyscale in recolored
Although recolored works with colored photos, I found the best results can be acheived with greyscale photos

Step 2: Colorize Walls / Furniture Using Brush & Pen Tool

I selected a shade of orange for the wall on the left and white for the one ahead.

Clicking on the Recolorize button shows you how it would look like

Looks good, let’s colorize the furniture (I know some of you might disagree with my choice of colors, but I did this in a hurry and didn’t think it through)

Recolorize for to get the final.

Much more interesting, don’t you think?

It only took three steps and less than 3 minutes to recolorize the entire room. There are downsides to using Recolored though

• You can’t colorize part of the image only, somehow the color manages to spread to the rest of the image
• There’s no visible history like photoshop, you will have to go through undos and redos, and i can’t seem to find a way to select a brush stroke and delete it. I had to over color segments of the photo (as you can see in the carpet segment), there’s an erase tool, but if found recoloring faster.
• It just doesn’t work with detailed photos. You won’t get good results if you’re trying to recolor a garden for instance. It takes loads of time to get it right and it won’t look perfect. Recolored is good for simple photos like a face shot, or a flat, etc.
• Last but not least, you will have to guess the colors for those old grandpa photos.

On the upside, it’s very easy to use, The built in color pallett makes it easy to pick colors for skin, lips, sky, etc. It’s inexpensive and has a 21 days version.
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This tutorial will cover how to simply turn a digital image into black and white while maintaing colors in a specific selection. Click on images to view details.

I’ve always loved this picture of my friend Sarah except as you can see, it’s not very presentable due to below-average digital photography equipment. the terribly plain and dowdy colors. It just looks- boring! So naturally, I hit Photoshop, my answer to all life’s problems… After some thought, I decided that I want the image to focus on Sarah, headline, “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” (a good Jack Johnson song).

First off, I selected Sarah and her chair using the pen tool (press P, draw selection around object, then press A, right click, select “Make Selection” and turn it into a selection path).

Right click on the selection and select “Select Inverse” to select the background image and leave Sarah and her chair intact. Now press Shift+Control+Z to desaturate the background then go to “Image” -> “Adjustments” -> “Brightness/Contrast” and increase the contrast.

Now that we have the background all darkened out, we need to set the focus on Sarah. Right click on the selection again and select “Select Inverse” to reselect Sarah and her chair. Now press Control+B and edit the colors to get the most out of them.

Finally, “Select Inverse” one last time and use the brush tool to add “weight” to Sarah and her chair by darkening and increasing the shadow beneath them (let’s not over do it though, eh?) The result should look like this:

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