Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Adding Color

There will be times when you want to add color that wasn’t originally part of an image, and Photoshop gives you lots of ways to do that. The techniques in this section will serve you well whether you’re colorizing a black-and-white image or adding color to an empty canvas. Read on!

Note

A few versions of Photoshop ago, you could use a variations adjustment to add color that wasn’t originally in an image. Then, in more recent versions, the adjustment worked only in 32-bit mode in Windows. But in Photoshop CC 2014, Adobe removed the variations adjustment completely.

Colorizing Images

Due to the expense of color film, full-color images didn’t become commonplace until the late ’60s. So chances are good that you’ve got some vintage black-and-white photos lying around, just dying to be scanned. Happily, you can use Photoshop to give them a little color (which, by the way, can be a nice side business if you get really good at it). Colorizing a black-and-white (or true grayscale) photo seems straightforward—just grab a brush and paint the image. Unfortunately, while that method adds color, it also covers up all the photo’s details, as shown in Figure 8-24, left.

Figure 8-24. Left: Unless you change the paint layer’s blend mode, the paint covers up all the details of this girl’s cute dress. Right: Setting the paint layer’s blend mode to Color lets the details come shining through. ...