Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

276 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Colorizing a Black-

and-White Photo

Colorizing a Black-and-White Photo

So far, you’ve read about ways to keep color in an image while you make part of it

black and white. But what about when you’ve got a black-and-white photo and

you want to add color to it? Elements makes things easy (or if not easy, then at

least possible). For instance, you can give an old photo the sort of hand-tinted

effect you sometimes see in antique prints, as shown in Figure 10-6.

You can easily color things with Elements. Before you start tinting your photo, first

make any needed repairs. See page 235 for repair strategies. For fixes to the expo-

sure, see page 174.

1. Make sure your photo’s in RGB mode.

Go to Image ➝ Mode ➝ RGB. Your photo must be in RGB mode or you can’t

color it.

Figure 10-5:

By painting with different

shades of gray on the

layer mask, you can

cause the effect of the

adjustment to be partially

transparent. Here, a

fairly light gray was used

to paint over the tree so

that a little green shows,

but it’s not the bright,

saturated green of the

original photo. Only part

of the tree was painted to

make it easy to see the

contrast with what was

there before.

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Chapter 10: Removing and Adding Color 277

Colorizing a Black-

and-White ...