Coloring a Black and White Image

[Paris]

Still waiting for Bunny's amazing tutorial, so this is just a temporary fix

I really hope more B&W images will be used and brought to life with color on this site!
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Duplicate Hair Layer and use Blending Mode Overlay at 100%

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[clark_ckcstm]

really cooool.

great work

[user name]

LOVE IT!!!!

[delek]

Big thanks mate

[Paris]

Glad you guys like it, can't wait for Tim's tutorial;)

You guys can practice on the huge array of B&Ws in our gallery (maybe show em' off in here)

[Bunny Dojo]

Nice work!

I'd go for a tutorial myself, but I don't really have a strict process down yet... it's a lot of fumbling and trying things until they look okay.

To add on to what you have here, one thing that comes to mind is getting your black levels all set. Depending on what kind of photo you're using as your starting point, you might have a lot of dark grays and no blacks, so you've got your shadows blending in with your midtones a bit. In this case, I'd call attention to the jacket, where you probably wouldn't have that plateau of nice brown. So, maybe something a little closer to:



Just a quick try, of course. The tricky thing about a colorization is that there's no real way to know what's right. (But I suppose that's also part of the fun. ).

Edit: Or, if you don't want things to get too dark, manually add in the shadows that seem to make sense to you, so maybe add some extra darkness under his sleeve. Just boosting the black level as I did above, you can lose some detail, so it's a bit of a trade off, I suppose. :S

[Sxxo]

Nice ... i will give it a try.
Thanks Paris.

[Paris]

Thanks Tim!

Also I have a few questions about blonde hair and scenery. I was coloring this image with this new tactics (in this tutorial) and was stumped with Newman's hair and the scenery. Would you mind doing a step by step on the two using this image? I mainly need help eighths scenery because it can make the picture really come to life Cool Hand Luke Image