Convert Black and White Photos to Color

All of us keeping old black and white photos. Sometimes we want to get this photos in color and the question is how?

This tutorial will show you how to Colorize Black and White Photos with Adobe Photoshop.

For our tutorial we will use black and white photo of baby. Our starting point and the result you can see at the picture below.

First open the black and white photo in Adobe Photoshop. Next click on Quick Mask mode (outlined with red circle) and by brush and suitable brush size lets start painting over the baby jacket. You can see that the brush leave semi-red spot. Now enclose the jacket with this brush entire jacket.

Now fill entire jacket with the brush until you cover it all with semi-red color. Later, this spot we will fill with color with desired color.

When finish, go back from Quick mask mode to Standard mode (press the button in left from Quick Mask mode button) and inverse selection, if the jacket is outside from the selection. Now from Image / Adjust / Hue/Saturation we can set the colorization. By moving Hue scroll we can select desired color from any. By moving Saturation scroll we can set desired "deep" of the color. In our example we will coloring the jacket with blue color.

Next let coloring the hat. Switch to Quiack Mask mode and like in the jacket enclose the entire hat.

Return to Standard mode and make coloring of the hat from Image / Adjust / Hue/Saturation menu. We use green color, but you have to feel free to use any other color.

Now lets color some parts of the baby toys and the picture on the nipple. Fix it with Quick Mash mode. Do the colorization like in the previous parts.

Next, lets mask the hood and the internal part of the hood which we will colorize later.

From Image / Adjust / Hue/Saturation menu you can do the coloring of the hood. We select red color for the hood.

Now lets mask for coloring the nipple and other parts of the toys.

We select light violet color for the colorization.

Here is the harder part. The face. Carefully mask the entire face in Quick Mask mode.

From Image / Adjust / Hue/Saturation menu select desired color by moving the scrolls of Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Getting realistic color is hard work and here may be you have to experiment more time.

And the final colorization is the eyes. Select the iris in the both eyes and color it by already known method.

Here is the final color photo. Is it sweet? :-)