Hand Colouring Monochrome Photographs
- Load the greyscale photograph.
- Decide which area you are going to colour and which colour
swatch you will use.
- Select or construct the desired colour as
foreground. If you construct the colour, save it as a swatch
even if only temporarily. (see instructions)
- Make a separate layer* for the area and name the layer
accordingly. In addition to the area you are colouring on
this layer, the name should also contain a reference to the colour
swatch you have used. If you need to do further work on the
layer you will need to re-select the swatch as this info is not
retained with the layer. The Layer Opacity and Blend Mode are
retained.
- Using a suitable (B)rush, paint the colour over the
required area. It is generally not essential to be absolutely
precise. It's sometimes best to use a soft brush.
Use [ and ] to change Brush size.
- Change the blend mode to
Color - try other blend
modes such as Overlay, Hue, Darken, Softlight,
Multiply, Colour Burn.
- Adjust the layer Opacity to suit.
- If you need to redo a layer to fill the odd hole,
don’t forget to re-select the foreground colour before
brushing on. You can also use the (E)raser to remove colour
which has spilled over.
- Repeat 2-8 for each area of the photograph.
- Group layers into Layer Sets and set the mode to Pass
Through if you have many areas of different colours.
These are a few useful colours you may need to construct.
| Colour |
Red |
Green |
Blue |
Mode |
Opacity |
| Flesh |
246 |
178 |
118 |
Colour |
50% |
| Lips |
180 |
50 |
50 |
Softlight |
35% |
| Sky |
74 |
188 |
233 |
Colour |
75% |
| Gold |
247 |
175 |
0 |
Overlay |
75% |
| Gold |
208 |
165 |
16 |
Overlay |
|
Saving a colour as a new swatch.
Once you have created a colour, you can store the settings as a
‘swatch’ by selecting Swatch on the colours panel
and then clicking the left hand icon of the two icons below this panel,
‘Create new swatch of foreground colour’.
You can rename or delete a swatch by right clicking it.
If you develop new useful colours or improve on those above, please
let
me know the data.
*To create a new layer, click the second icon from right
at the
bottom
of the Layers Panel.