How To Color A Black And White Image In Photoshop

This is a commonly asked question by artists and something I myself had some difficulty with so I thought I'd write a tutorial for other artists looking for some assistance.


Before we start you'll need ether a black and white photo or have already done a painting in greyscale. If your doing a painting keep in mind that for best results your painting should have a wide range of greyscale tones from almost absolute black to  almost pure white, and the reason I say almost is because pure white and black are not going to absorb any color, you can paint in pure white highlights later, or use levels at the end to get the extreme lights and darks. Your image should basically be a finished greyscale painting, doing art this way has the added benefit of allowing you to focus on your tonal values and avoid elements in the image ending up separated only by color, a common mistake.





The first step in adding color is to get a base down and a simple way to do this is to pick a foreground color from the tool bar that is a mid tone of what you intend the overall color of the image to be, then pick a slightly darker version of the first color as the background. Next make a new layer and go to: filter - render - clouds. Change layer mode to Color and reduce it's opacity to about 30-50% This will add the initial color and some variation to work from. If your base colors are worm like mine you can make a new layer called shadows, set mode to color and paint in some mid tone blue in the shadows with a soft brush at a low opacity to cool the shadows down. Next make a series of new layers named reds, greens, yellows and so on for each color you wont to use and with a similar brush to the one used for the shadows start lightly painting in your desired colors and basically blocking in what color goes where. You will have to experiment at this stage with layer modes and opacity to find the right balance for your image as every image will be different, I find the blend modes color and overlay the most useful, but also make use of soft light and multiply.





Your image should be looking like a color image that's been de-saturated by now, this is what I call the ugly stage. Your also are likely to have a lot of layers so do a save as to make a back up copy, then in the layers pallet menu flatten image. It's time to start the second stage of the color process. Photos are excellent for helping to color black and white images. For my image I have used a photo I took of some water in a mangrove forest that was a variety of greens, I blended the photo into my image to color the swamp water. To do this I just opened the photo in photoshop cut out the general part of the photo I needed using the lasso tool, moved it to my illustration and changed the blend mode and then with a soft eraser tool removed any unwonted parts of the photo. It's not necessary to use photos for their color but it dose work very well to boost the color and further detail or texture your image. Continue adding new layers of painted colour or photos. If your using photos don't forget to make color adjustments to the photos if needed or to resize the photo in transform mode (ctrl+T). At this stage it's good to open the hue and saturation (ctrl+U) and bump up the saturation if needed, and adjust levels (ctrl+L). You should now have a colourful image :-)