Colorize Black and White Photos with Photoshop

Colorize Black and White Photos with Photoshop

In today's life, many people's homes have some old photos from the past, but due to the objective conditions at that time, most of these photos are in black and white. The people in the photos are either absent from their youth or have passed away. If they want to relive or cherish the demeanor of their past, they always feel that there is a lack of true color, and it must be said that it is a pity. There are many ways to color these photos, but it is not easy to make the colors very realistic. Here is a method of coloring black and white photos with Photoshop computer software, which I feel can be more realistic and natural.

1. Basic principles and methods of coloring

A person's skin color changes naturally in the photo, and the colors are complex and rich. But theoretically, we can assume that the hue and saturation of a person's skin color are only related to ethnicity, but for the same person, we can assume that these two parameters are basically fixed for all skin colors. However, the reason why the skin color on the portrait photo is rich and changeable is the influence of external light, that is, the brightness. The color of the same brightness area is basically the same. According to this assumption, we only need to color the skin color of the person in the photo according to the brightness parameter. , and finally do a natural transition processing on it.

Second, the coloring example

1. Scan the photo into the computer and convert it to Lab mode. Since the brightness will become a main identification parameter during the operation, the Lab mode can be used to operate the brightness channel (L channel), so as to meet our requirements for different colors according to the brightness. Here is an example of a photo of a child.

2. Make a selection area, use the selection tool to select all the skins of the people in the portrait, and use "Layer"→"New"→"Layerviacut". In this way, the skin of the person used can be formed into a separate layer, and the human hair can be formed in a separate layer in the same way.

3. Designate the current operation layer as the layer where the skin is located, turn to the channel panel, and select the "luminance channel (L channel). Specify the foreground color in the toolbar as L: 95, a: 0, b: 0. Execute the command in the menu. : "Select"→"Color Range", the tolerance parameter is set between 20 and 30, so that you can select all areas in the picture within this brightness range.

4. Call the menu command: "Select" → "Load Selection", and select the intersection option in the pop-up dialog box (that is, the last item Intersectwith selection, the same below), so that all selection areas can be guaranteed to be within the skin range.

5. In the channel control panel, specify the Lab synthesis channel (ie the first channel). Specify the foreground color as: L: 95 unchanged, a: 5, b: 19.

6. Select the brush tool in the toolbox, and set the coloring mode of the tool to: Color. Set the brush's Brushes above 60 (it can be a bit bigger, which will speed up the shading). Note: Color mode is a mode that keeps the brightness constant, uses the hue and saturation of the specified foreground color, draws and creates the resulting color.

7. Use the brush tool to paint in the selection area of the image until all the selection area is painted with color.