Convert black and white photo to color online. Colorize a black and white photo: colorize online

You can step over the edges, it's even better to do it. After you have painted over all areas of the skin without missing a single pixel, press the "Quick Mask" button again. A selection should appear. Make sure all the skin gets into it:

Go to the top menu "Layers", select "New Layer Fill", then "Color", you can give the layer a name. Select the mode "Soft light", press "OK" - a palette appears where you need to choose a color:

With skin, this is not easy, you need to look for yellow and pink shades. If you can’t find a natural color in any way, then choose the tone that best suits your skin color, we’ll try to correct it later. Click OK.
We go to the "Layers" window and see that a new fill layer has appeared there, consisting of two parts. Click on the second part in the form of a black square, a white frame should appear around it.

In the tools, we should still have the "Brush" active with the same settings. The main color on the toolbar should be black - this is important. Now the brush will work like an eraser. We remove everything superfluous - what we painted over by accident, leaving the color only on the skin. We try to do it carefully:

So, we have painted the skin to correct its color, go to the "Layers" window, select the fill layer and make a duplicate of it.

Now in the new layer, double-click on the colored square - a palette appears. Select another color that will be superimposed on the first layer and blended with it. You can mix pink and yellow shades, then you get a natural tone:

Now go to the "Background Copy" layer, click the "Quick Mask" again and continue painting, creating new fill layers. Do not forget to return to the main layer every time, otherwise nothing will work.

In the example, we dyed the hair in Brown color, then lips in red:

And the iris of the eyes is painted green. Next, make the clothes purple:

Then a blue background, since our model is sitting by the water. and painted separately green trees, reflected in the water, as well as the boards on which she sits, although they are almost imperceptible. Details are always important. Result:

It is especially interesting to colorize retrophotos. If you have family archives with rare photographs, now you do not need to take them to the workshop, but you can digitize and color them yourself.

Having mastered this technique, you can also do color on black and white in Photoshop. It's pretty original solution You must have seen photos like this.

For example, in the image below, we gave the girl red lips and turquoise eyes, leaving everything else in black and white:

In exactly the same way, you can change the tones in color photos, for example, change the color of hair, clothing, background, and so on.

Today. digital camera Almost everyone has it in one form or another. And photography, in itself, has become a truly mass hobby. Digital technology is developing so rapidly that now, in order to get high-quality photographs, it is not at all necessary to have an expensive, professional camera. After all, today, even cameras on phones have learned to take good pictures. For example, the same iPhone, now shoots no worse than a full-fledged digital camera. What can we say about semi-professional or professional mirrors.

But until recently, cameras were exclusively film, and photographs were mostly black and white. And the process of developing photographs was a whole mystery. Now we remember all this with a smile, and some, in a nostalgic impulse, even acquire or restore old photographic equipment, trying to repeat the unforgettable experience of obtaining analog photographs.

But it's one thing to apply the effects of an old photo to an already finished picture, and quite another to restore an old photo to the state of a new one, or colorize photo in photoshop.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to completely eliminate all the defects of old photographs, because. it all depends on the general condition of the photo, as well as factors such as:

Photo age

Color fade in photo

Scratches and microcracks on the front surface of the photo

Irreversible loss of some snapshot elements

In most cases, an old photograph can be significantly improved, or even completely restored to its original characteristics. And you can do even better than the original source. About one of these operations, namely, how to turn a black and white photo into color, we will talk in today's material.

Color matching

It will be more difficult to make a photo in color in Photoshop than to carry out the reverse operation, where the whole process can be reduced to literally a few mouse clicks. This will require painstaking handmade in the graphic editor Adobe Photoshop . Therefore, in order to turn a black and white photo into color, it will be necessary hand colorize the image. At the same time, for some parts of the image, it will be possible to show imagination, and arbitrarily color them, choosing individual colors.

For example, the black-and-white photo shows a portrait of a man in a Quid suit. Let's say we don't know the original color of the suit, so we can color it however we like, for example, beige. The color of other elements of the image can be determined by one or another, obvious signs. It goes without saying that we will paint the sky predominantly blue, and the clouds gray-white. Definitely, the grass and foliage on the trees should be dyed green.

But still, in most cases, the original colors of some elements of the image will remain unknown, and they will need to be selected in order to get a photo image that is natural in color.

Therefore, before turning a black and white photo into a color one, you must first decide on the color design all elements of the photograph. If you are at a loss with the selection of colors, then you can look at the color analogues of photographs that are similar in structure, or ask for help from people who understand this, for example, from photographers or graphic designers.

Color fill

After the colors are selected, we proceed directly to the process of coloring a black and white photograph. ways colorize photo with photoshop, there are several. We will consider one of them, namely - color fill method for individual adjustment layers. For this we need:

original photo file

Graphic editor Adobe Photoshop

Layout with selected colors for filling (remember, we had to define it in advance)

Time and a little patience, because the operation is quite laborious.

In order to black white photograph make color, step by step perform the following steps:

1) Uploading a photo to Adobe Photoshop
2) In order to always return to the original file if our experiments go too far, we create in Photoshop duplicate layer
3) In the layers palette, click on the icon New adjustment layer", and in the proposed options for creating a layer, select - Color or Chroma (solid color)

After that, a color palette will appear, in which you need to select the color closest to the color of the part of the photo image that we intend to fill. For example, if it is grass, then choose green color, if the sky, then blue, if the sun, then accordingly yellow. Again, based on the layout of colors that we made earlier, before starting to turn a black and white photo into color.

Let's say we decide to start coloring our photo from the face. Accordingly, select in the color palette of the new adjustment layer, a dark beige color ( closest to the color structure of the face, in our case).

So, the color for the face is selected, but now it completely fills our entire photo. To exclude this, in the layers palette, select from the drop-down list of options - Color or Chroma. By default, it is set to - Blend mode and this needs to be changed.

Excellent! Now the adjustment layer only affects the color of the bottom layer, and we see our photo with a tint of the color chosen for the face. Now our task is to leave this color only on the part of the photo image for which it is intended. In our case, this is the face. To do this, click on the icon Layer mask, after which an outline will appear on the layer thumbnail.

Now select in the Photoshop tool palette - " Eraser", and erase everything except the face.

Attention! As you can see in our example, the neck and part of the chest are similar to the face. color characteristic. But we will also erase them, and create for them separate adjustment layer. This is explained by the fact that the color shade between the face and neck is still quite different. And, later, these differences will be possible to emphasize only on different layers.

The more adjustment layers we create, the better it will be to color a black and white photo into color later.

Editing the finished layout with adjustment layers

So, we filled it with a color similar in color, our first element is the face. The same is to be done with all other elements of the photographic image. Those. just repeat the above operation for other elements of the photo, taking into account their color features. Don't worry that the colors will be hyper-exaggerated and unnatural. We will fix this a little later by editing each adjustment layer. Now the main thing is to fill in the main elements of the photo image colors similar in color. Moreover, the more elements will be selected in a separate adjustment layer, the better!

After we have worked out all the elements of the photographic image, it will be much easier for us to cope with the task of making a color photograph from black and white. Of course, now the colors look artificial, but, nevertheless, we have a ready-made layout with different layers that are available for processing separately, which will give us undeniable advantages manufacturing color photo through photoshop. Actually, we will now proceed to this processing.

Let's go in order, and start with the first layer. We need to correct color scheme faces. As you can see in your original version, the skin tone is hyper-exaggerated and certainly doesn't look natural. Let's try to fix this.

4) Double click on the layer thumbnail in the layers palette and experiment with the adjustment layer settings. It is necessary to work with the existing color, so you do not need to touch the tone settings, but operate with the sliders responsible for the brightness and color saturation of the edited area. We need to achieve the most natural color reproduction by controlling the changes in color parameters in live preview mode.

Well, that's a completely different matter. We do the same with the rest of the layers. That is, we just double-click on the thumbnail of each layer, and in the settings we change the color parameters to the most natural colors. This is very convenient, because working with many layers, we are able to convey color shades much more accurately than in the case of manual painting. individual elements snapshot described in most of the ways that teach how to take black and white photos colored.

At the very last stage, we change the corrective color of the background and eyes. For a more harmonious visual effect, you can choose colors for the background to match the color of the eyes, or vice versa, the color of the eyes to match the background color ( unless of course it contradicts the general concept of the picture).

When creating an adjustment layer for small elements of the picture, for example, for the same eyes, you need to erase the entire image with an eraser, except for the iris itself. This is a rather painstaking operation, so in case of an error, just switch to the mode - Brush, and repaint the area where you erased the excess. At the same time, it is recommended to set the brush strength to 50% .

You will need

To perform the operations of this instruction, it is desirable that you be at least basicly familiar with Adobe Photoshop: you know what layers and layer masks are, you know how to use a brush and other basic tools of this program.

Instruction

To add color to an image - the color of a black and white or faded photograph, to color or recolor a pencil drawing or a solid color, etc. – special technical costs and complex operations are not required. It is enough to open the original image in Adobe Photoshop, create a new layer on top of the base image and, setting it to Color mode, apply fragmentary areas of the required colors on it. You can do this with a brush or other program tools. The original image in the right places will acquire the desired color scheme.
Of course, the hardest part is actually getting the color layer right, especially if you want to achieve the most photorealistic image.

To begin with, we will analyze: we will study the original image and mentally try to divide it into more or less large fragments, the color inside of which should be fairly uniform. These are, for example, objects made of the same material, or objects that have a completely predictable combination of colors, solid arrays - foliage, grass, walls, floors, etc. The main thing is that the colors inside such a fragment obey a single simple law: dark, shadowy areas tend to one color, medium-light areas have their own approximately the same shade, and light areas have their own.
For each such homogeneous fragment, you can create your own color layer that describes the necessary pattern.
First of all, let's create a layer mask so that the coloring action only applies to the desired fragment of the original image. For example, let's trace the outline of an object with the Lasso tool. After finishing the selection, create a new Gradient Map layer (Menu Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Gradient Map). In the layers panel, set the blend mode switch of the created layer to Color.
Let's start creating a spectrum. On the left in the gradient there will be colors responsible for the dark areas of the image, on the right - for the light ones. If you have a good visual memory and artistic taste, colors can be chosen "by eye", however, a pre-prepared photograph will greatly facilitate the work, the nature of the image in which is similar to the one being recreated. In this sample, already ready-made the main combinations of colors will be presented, therefore, the colors of the gradient can simply be typed with an eyedropper tool from the sample. One way or another, we select the color and location of the markers on the gradient, visually controlling how plausible the result is.

You can create as many layers as you need. Each layer in the list of layers above can overlap the layers below, and if the layer masks intersect, then upper layer will be crucial in the story of the color shade. Therefore, you can go initially from painting large spaces, to the subsequent creation of smaller color fragments, overlaying new ones. color combinations into smaller and smaller parts, creating more and more layers on top.
Of course, layer masks can be created not only by tracing objects along the path. The mask can simply be painted with a black or white brush, respectively, adding or excluding the areas of effect of the color layer. In order to “draw on the mask”, you must first click the cursor on the rectangle on the right - schematic representation masks - in the line of the desired layer on the panel Layers (Layers).
It is very convenient that each created layer can be re-edited at any time, change the colors of the spectrum - for this, just double-click on the line of the layer in the list of the layer in the list of the Layers panel (Layers), and proceed to modify the gradient. Also, the mask of each layer can be erased, corrected, painted over, or even re-created.

Having painted large homogeneous areas of the image in this way, we proceed to the next stage - the stage of manual finishing. This requires observation and logic. The fact is that even identically painted surfaces that have a completely uniform color never look uniform in real optical conditions. Light falls on each surface: direct - from light sources, reflected - from nearby surfaces, in addition, when the observer looks at different angles, the same Color tone looks different. Therefore, in addition to color gradients - tending to "flatten" surfaces, because with this method of coloring, the volume and location in space are not taken into account - we will create additional color layers that correct them.
For example, in the proposed picture, the color of the light column in the upper part will gravitate towards blue, because next to it is a large blue wall, reflected cold color which will necessarily fall on the column and illuminate it, changing the color shade. Bottom part columns closer to the floor will take on the reflected tones of orange highlights from the parquet.
To show this in our work, just above the Gradient Map layer defining base color columns, create a new clean layer (Menu Layer>New Layer), and transfer it to the blending mode Color. On it with a soft translucent brush, carefully apply the necessary spots - a cold shade at the top, a warm orange at the bottom. You can also play along with brown reflexes from standing next to walnut table. By adjusting the parameter Opacity (Transparency) of the created layer, you can reduce and increase the influence of the adjustment layer on the image.
Another law, where there is less illumination - the colors are more faded, where there is more light, in addition to the actual brightness of the image, the color saturation itself will be an order of magnitude higher. This, for example, must be taken into account when giving color to the floor: in the proposed illustration, in the shady areas, the reddish color of the parquet will look more faded. And in the darkest places, the colors of all surfaces can have an almost indistinguishable color tone from each other.
FROM special attention should be treated to human skin. First of all, the skin absorbs glare very well, therefore, for example, for a standing character, the side of the face that faces the column will be much colder than the one that is exposed to the light from the red curtain. In addition, the skin itself is rarely even in color - the cheeks are usually a warmer shade than the skin around the eyes, open areas- tanned, blood vessels will be visible through thin skin, etc. Therefore, work on skin color is always very painstaking, but with sufficient observation, with a little practice, you can easily achieve a completely plausible result.

It is recommended to save the final image in two different formats. Firstly, in the format of the Abode Photoshop program, where information about all created layers will be saved, which will make it possible to further modify and supplement the image. And secondly, in a commonly used format, such as JPEG, for quick viewing, and other operations with the file, in which there is no need for layer-by-layer editing. This can be done through the File>Save As menu, specifying the file format, its name and storage location on disk. And in a format suitable for transport on the Internet, it is easy to save the image through the File>Save for Web menu.

Colorize a black and white photo online in one click in Algorithmia

In order to make a picture black and white online, dozens of Internet resources have been created, but only one is provided for the reverse function - Algorithmia. The work of this unusual site is built on practical application neural networks. In addition to the fact that he can convert an image from black and white to color, he can also:

determine the area depicted in the photo;
to distinguish the faces of people in the pictures;
analyze the positive/negative mood of the given text;
and much more.

Algorithmia has an English-language interface, but since the section we need - Colorize Photos - implies only one function, working with it does not cause any difficulties.

So, upload your bw photo, which we are going to colorize - this can be done by selecting a picture on a computer or by entering a link to its location on the Internet.

If you just want to test how to turn a black and white photo into a color one, you can choose one of the pictures offered here for an example.

The coloring process takes about half a minute. Next, we are offered to evaluate the photo before and after.

Move the purple slider to see the effect of the changes

You can save both a fully colored drawing and the comparison itself - a photo partially in color and partially in b/w. I was a little disappointed with the watermark on the finished picture, but it is quite compact and modestly located in the corner. You can get rid of it by simply cropping the image.

Through several experiments, we found out that the service copes best with painting skin, water and trees. The clearer their boundaries, the better the result.

Let's compare - on the left is the original photo, which we discolored and uploaded to the site, and on the right - its colorized version

As you can see, Algorithmia distinguishes people well and automatically colors the skin in beige tones. True, the service does not feel the borders very well, so the cardigan, just in case, was also made flesh-colored.

In the background behind the girl, the editor "didn't recognize" the Christmas tree, so he just left it dark spot. But he clearly defined the color of the gift and jeans and did almost everything right, except for the beige trouser leg in the foreground and very blurry borders. The service decided to “revive” the bird in the corner of the picture, so it made it yellowish.

In general, of course, there are certain flaws in the result, but all the same, Algorithmia deserves respect, if only because it is the only site that allows you to turn a black and white photo into color.

How to colorize a picture in Photoshop: a simple guide for beginners

We want to say right away that this method will require much more time than the previous one. Also here you will need minimal skills in Photoshop, and the more of them, the more beautiful the result will be.

Load the image into Photoshop and create a new empty layer. Next, use the "Quick Selection" tool and click on the objects that we are going to convert to one color.

Use the Alt key to deselect unwanted area

Select the tool "Brush", select the appropriate color and sketch the selected fragments.

If you want the shades to be not too saturated, you can reduce the opacity and pressure of the brush.
In order to preserve the presence of shadows and color transitions, change the layer blending mode to "Overlay"
It already looks much more natural.

We repeat the same operations with the rest of the objects in the photo. Recall the sequence:

create a new layer;
select a fragment;
apply the desired color;
change the layer's blend mode.

For convenience, it is better to name each new layer in accordance with the fragment being painted.

If the edges are not handled too carefully, then this will definitely be noticeable and the picture will look unnatural. We recommend using the "Gaussian Blur" function with a small radius to smooth out all the imperfections a little.

In the "Filter" section, select "Blur", and then - "Gaussian Blur". Then just control the radius until you achieve an organic result.

Let's see what happened in the end. On the left is the original photo, which we then discolored, on the right is its color version.

In general, the new image looks quite natural, although many shades are different from those in original version

Summing up, we can say that making a black and white photo color in Photoshop is much more difficult and longer than using an online service. For comparison, let's say that the whole process took us more than an hour, although in Algorithmia everything would be ready in a few seconds. True, the result in Photoshop is more organic and predictable, and you can control all the moments yourself.

So far, these are all ways to colorize a black and white photo. Therefore, decide what is more important for you - efficiency or quality of the result, and rather use all the advice received in practice!