Colour Greyscale Photographs By Adrian
Simple tutorial on how to colour objects in Greyscale photographs.
First start by opening your greyscale image. This is the picture I will be using. You can use it if you wish. I will be colouring the chair a light brown/orange colour.


Open the image and go to Image-> Mode-> RGB Color. This will allow you to actually have some colour!

Now make a new layer. Name it 'colour'. Set the Foreground Colour to hex #7b5019 or similar. Now select your 'colour' layer. Get the Polygonal Lasso Tool, zoom in and start clicking on all the sides to get the shape of your chair. Once done it should look something similar to this:


Tip: If you are selecting round objects, make lots more corners with the Polygonal Lasso Tool and try setting the feather to 1px.

While holding down Alt, cut out the back of the chair until your selection looks like this:


Now press Alt+Backspace to fill the selection with the foreground colour (which should be #7b5019). Press Ctrl+D to deselect the selection. You should now have a rather odd looking brown chair:


Set the Layer Blend Mode to Soft Light. Then duplicate the layer and change the Layer Blend Mode to Color Dodge and set the opacity to about 50%. Try messing around with the colour layers and Blend Modes until you come up with something good.

Nice short and simple yet very effective tutorial, hope this helps some of you. After adding some more colour I came up with this:

With more time I could probably make this look allot better,

You can download this file from the downloads section here.

-Adrian

This post has been edited by Adrian: Mar 5 2006, 11:29 AM

Pretty kwel effect this effect applied to an close photo of an face and using the lips is also pretty neat !

Great tutorial, easy to understand

Nicely explained and written.

Thankyou for adding this Adrian

This tut is excellent. And your right. It is simple but effective. Also, the effects remind me of that new Sin City movie.

cool effect and nice tut!

thanks for adding adrian

Nice and useful tutorial!Well explained too! Thanks!

Thanks! This is cool

Thanks Adrian, I didn't knew how they did it, but it looks quite easy. I'm going to try it also in psp.

No problem man. Aslong as 1 person finds it useful then its been worthwhile!

-Adrian

wow!!! so simple yet effective