From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Quick-and-dirty colorization - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Quick-and-dirty colorization

- [Narrator] In this movie, I'll show you what I consider to be the most basic, brain-dead, quick and dirty way to colorize an image. The great thing about it is it works on a layer by layer basis. The first thing I'm going to do is duplicate this image and the reason is, I want to show you the difference between converting an image to grayscale and desaturating it. I'll go ahead and duplicate the image, and I'll call it default grayscale, let's say. Then, I'll go up to the image menu, choose Mode, and choose grayscale, and then I'll click on the discard button in order to render the image down to a single channel. Alright, now I'll go ahead and switch over to the original photograph and I'm going to convert this background to an independent layer by double clicking on it, and I'll go ahead and call this layer portrait, let's say. Then, I'll create a copy of it by pressing CTRL+J or Command+J on the Mac and the reason for all this will become abundantly clear in just a moment. You don't really need two copies of the layer, I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes. Alright, now I'll go up to the image menu choose adjustments and choose desaturate. That's going to remove the saturation from the image so that it appears in black and white even though we're still working in the RGB color space. Now, I want you to see that this is a different effect than converting the image to grayscale. It's not way different, in the case of this image, but it is a little bit different, and it can be quite a bit different, depending on the photograph. Alright, having shown you that, here's the actual technique. Drop down to the fx icon and choose the color overlay effect. Now, by default, that's going to turn the entire image gray as we're seeing here. What you want to do instead, is click on this little color swatch and dial in whatever color it is that you want to use. In my case, I'm going to dial in the hue value of 30 degrees which is orange, I'll take the saturation up to a very low value, just 20 and I'll set the brightness value to 50%. Then, I'll go ahead and click OK. What that does, is it gives us this kind of dull brown that's perfectly suited to sepia tones and so to make that happen, just go ahead and change the blend mode from normal to color and you'll end up with this effect here. At which point, you can just go ahead and click OK to accept that change. That way, if you ever change your mind, all you have to do is double click on color overlay, click on that color swatch and change the hue value to anything you like, such as let's say 210 degrees, and then click OK and click OK again and now we have a cool monochrome image. I want to stick with the sepia tone, so I'll just go ahead and press CTRL+Z or Command+Z on the Mac to undo. Now, another great thing about working this way is you don't actually have to start with a desaturated image, that's why I created this copy right here. What I'm going to do is alt or option+drag that color overlay effect onto the bottom layer and now notice if I turn off the top layer, we get a pretty similar effect. It's not identical, as you can see, things brighten up a little bit when I turn the desaturated layer back on, but it does demonstrate the fact that you can effectively colorize a full color image. That is my preferred quick and dirty method of colorizing independent layers using a color overlay effect here inside Photoshop.

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