Adding Colour to Black & White Photographs

Posted: Apr 2008, Lorraine | In: Photography | Leave a comment

I was recently asked if I could add some colour and remove tiny imperfections from some old black & white wedding photographs. The job is now complete, you can see the images in the projects section, and I thought I'd share some of the techniques I used.

Getting started

My first thought was that I didn’t want to simply add splashes of colour here and there such as on the lips and cheeks. I wanted to retain the old look and feel of the image whilst gently bringing some colour into it, and it was while I was playing with sepia tones in Photoshop that I came across the technique I would use to add colour.

Firstly I scanned the photo at 200dpi, in grayscale. I then opened the scan and saved it as my master file “master.psd”.

Create the duotone document

I decided the first part of the image I would tackle was the dress and bonnet, which was a pale pink. So I made a copy of the original photo into a new Photoshop document and named it “pink.psd”. I converted the document to duotone [image > mode > duotone] and selected two colours that would make up the shade of pink I wanted, but more vibrant. Once I was happy with the shade, I saved the document and copied the image back into my “master.psd” file.

Note: If your document isn’t already grayscale, Photoshop won’t allow you to convert it to duotone. You must first convert to grayscale, and discard colour information, then you can convert to duotone.

(TIP: You can save the shade of duotone by selecting the “save” option in the duotone dialogue box. Useful if you ever want to use that exact setting again or if you need to adjust the colours just slightly. Then, when you convert a file to duotone again, just chose “load” from the duotone dialogue box and select your saved colours.)

Erase the unwanted area

I now had two layers in my master, the original photo on the bottom or “background” layer, and the pink duotone on the next layer.

Selecting the Eraser Tool in Photoshop, I began to carefully delete all the areas of the pink layer that I wanted to get rid of, leaving just the bonnet and dress. I used the Brush mode of the Eraser Tool, and set it to 50px with 100% hardness fto erase all the main areas. I then set the brush to 15px with 0% hardness, to erase carefully around the edges of the dress and bonnet, so I didn’t leave any hard edges.

What I was left with was the original black and white image showing through, with just the dress and bonnet on the pink layer sitting on top. As I’d originally made the pink quite vibrant in the duotone file, I set the layer opacity to 48%, which reduced the pink to a much more delicate shade and allowed important shadows and highlights from the original black and white image on the background layer to show through.

Creating the rest of the layers

I continued to use this method for all individual areas of colour: skin; hair; lips; jewellery etc. Each time, saving my duotone palettes and building up layers in my “master.psd” Photoshop file. I played around with the opacity settings on each layer until I decided on the strength of colour for each area of the photo.

Once I was happy with the finished artwork, I saved it as both a high res print PDF and a jpeg so my client could print a good quality copy, and also have a version on her computer she could email to friends.

See the outcome in our Projects section

You can see the outcome of this task in projects.