This step by step tutorial will show you how you can hand color your black and white photos. Have you ever wanted to take a black and white photo and make it look the way you want it to look instead of the way the image looks in real life? Would you like to learn how to color a part of a black and white photograph, while leaving the rest in black and white, to emphasize it? By the end of this tutorial, you will know how to!

First of all, you need a black and white photograph. You can scan it in, get it from your digital camera, whatever. If you have a color photograph that you want to turn black and white and you don't know how, read this tutorial and then come back.

Make sure the image is in "RGB Color" Mode. It may already be, but it may be in Grayscale and in order for you to colorize the image at all, it has to be in "RGB Color" Mode. You can change the image mode to "RGB Color" by going to the "Image" menu, selecting "Mode" and sliding over and down and selecting "RGB Color."



It's good to separate each part of the image into layers. If you didn't already know, layers are like clear sheets of acetate, with different parts of a drawing stacked on top of each other, animators used to use. Layers allow you to do some pretty powerful things in Photoshop. Create a new layer by clicking on the "Create a new layer" icon on the bottom of the "Layers" palette. It kind of looks like a turned page, second from the right. Or you can just use the keyboard shortcut, "Shift+Ctrl+N."



Change the blending mode of the new layer to "Color". This allows us to apply color without losing the shades of gray. To change the blending mode, go to the blending mode field near the top of the "Layers" palette and click on the down arrow and scroll down near the bottom and select "Color."