Hand Tinting Color on Black and White Photographs

An easy Photoshop technique to play around with.

Here we go! This is called hand-tinting or hand painting. It’s a pretty simple technique where you use the brush in photoshop to color in a black and white image. You can emphasize the subject and keep the rest of the photo black and white like my example here, or you can paint the whole image. There are lots of different options, and it’s another fun way to explore your creativity and try something you might not normally gravitate to.

First, make your photo black and white. You can do this by adding a black and white adjustment layer so you are not permanently changing the original image. If you do this, you can always go back and start over, or just compare to the original color image.

Now, make a new layer above the black and white layer. Change the blending mode on this new layer from ‘normal’ to ‘soft light’ or ‘vivid light’. As the names suggest, soft light is more muted, and vivid light is more bright and saturated. With a brush, paint in your desired color. If you leave the blending mode on normal, you will be covering the image completely with the brush. With soft or vivid light, the color appears to be part of the image. You can change the blending mode at any time, so you don’t need to redo your work if you want to see what the other modes look like. For every new color or area of the image, use a new layer so you can adjust and edit them separately.

Tips:

• After painting in color, adjust the opacity of the layer to find the right balance or look you want.
• Adjust the hardness of the brush so the edges aren’t too harsh. If an edge is still too sharp and obvious, remember you can change the opacity of the brush itself, and the same is true for the eraser tool.
• Use layers of darker and brighter colors, or the dodge and burn tools, to add shading and highlights.

Pretty simple, huh? I think most people make the color more subtle than my example, and this technique is often used to add color to old photos or make new photos look like old photos. I was inspired by the Chesire Cat and wanted to try something more colorful than what I might normally do.

Does this seem like a technique you would enjoy or will try?