How to Colorize a Black and White Photo in Photoshop

Take a 'boring' black and white photo, and give it some color in Photoshop! This tutorial covers selection methods, Adjustment Layers, and Layer Masks, all of which will help you in your photo editing. Make sure to check out my other Photoshop tutorials for more on text effects, photo editing, photo retouching, and more! Links below!

Tools used in this tutorial:

Quick Selection Tool: This selection method works very similar to a brush, allowing you to brush over the areas you wish to turn into a selection. By default, every stroke adds to your selection. If you wish to deselect some areas, hold down your Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) key and brush.

Refine Edge: When you initially create a selection, it's likely to be very sharp around the edges, and likely won't contain hair or fur. Refine Edge will allow you to not only soften out those edges, but you'll be able to use Smart Radius to grab hair and fur which may not have been selected.

Layer Masks: If there's an area of your layer that you wish to hide (or bring back), Layer Masks will help you do that. Painting using a black brush will hide portions of the layer, and painting with a white brush will reveal them. Black and white gradients can also be used.

Adjustment Layers: By using an Adjustment Layers, you're able to change targeted areas of your photo without damaging the original layer. These can either be applied to the full image, or specific areas using selections or Layer Masks. At any point in the future, you can either make changes to the adjustment, hide it, or delete it completely.

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Howard Pinsky provides free #graphicdesign tutorials covering #CreativeCloud, Adobe #Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe XD to the graphic design and photography community. To date, the videos uploaded to this channel channel have been viewed over 80 million times.

No matter what you're looking to learn in Photoshop, you're bound to find it in our library of over 350 tutorials. Topics include: Text Effects in Photoshop, Photo Composition, Photo Retouching, The Basics of Photoshop, Designing in Photoshop, Special Effects, and more! While new videos will be taught using the latest version of Photoshop, you'll find videos covering Photoshop CC, Photoshop CS6, CS5, CS4, and CS3.

[Catra]

Howard, you are awesome! There's no other place in the online world to go for informative and easy to follow Photoshop tutorials. Thank you so much and keep 'em coming!!

[HowardPinsky]

Archived video: Colorize your black and white photos in #Photoshop! 

[AngrySackBoy]

What a fantastic tutorial. Cutting the "what and why" aspect of the tutorial made this absurdly easy to follow. Thanks mate!

[HowardPinsky]

Have you ever wanted to colorize a black and white photo? Here's a video tutorial on how to easily do it in #Photoshop! 

[flemmingnor]

love the "bloopers", freaking amazing that you made a black and white image to look so good!

[Daniel-Rosa.]

Excellent! You truly benefitted from keeping it around 5 minutes. I like a short video that I need to watch back better than a long video I'll probably only watch once.

[emre.aktuna]

listen to me:
"this is the best and the most proffesional and simplest method, and very very good tutorial"

if you searched tutorial for coloring, this is your place.

thanks.

[HowardPinsky]

Archived Video: Learn how to colorize a black and white photo in Adobe #Photoshop!

[lilianahernandez]

Thanks for sharing this tutorial, it is awesome and way more sophisticated than most tutorials of this kind.

[ladyheinz]

really enjoy your tutorials, even though i no longer have photoshop, i still like learning. 

[xdarkalice]

Excellent tutorial, simple fast and effective, thank you so much.

[BicycleOwnage]

You shouldn't use CMYK because it is easier to get the result you want, the only reason for using CMYK is if you are going to print the image out for a magazine or something similar. CMYK is used for print, whilst RGB is an addative system used for digital work on monitors, projectors or on the internet. The reason for this is that you can't blend Red, Green and Blue ink on a paper and get white, and you can't add black (Key) to a monitor because a monitor is only light. Converting an RGB image to CMYK you actually lose colour information, and should only be done once the image is done and you are going to put it on paper.

And by the way, the clouds you can select the matte and paint over them with a soft brush or something to remove the colourization from them.

[jenetmunoz]

Super LOVE YOU!!! LOL, .I love your tutorial...so much...direct to the point and very specific and informative!!!

[northshoredon]

Thanks for the help Howard, great tutorial.

[Gohan]

Wow!!!! thanks so much for your tutos man. Thumb up!!!

[AnnakiVEVO]

Wow coloring for you is like masking the black and white fx ! :D

[mikeandersonwa]

wow... that was incredible! Now to go try this!!

[descondificandopontocom]

Just an amazing tutorial and simple explanation, thank you very much Howard!

[tyjuji]

Looks really convincing to me. I imagine the result would be perfect with a little more time.

[ProfesorMacOnline]

Brilliant!!! Sharp and concise. To the point.