emalik’s blog

Today i am going to show how you can convert the old looking black and white image to color without any plugin in adobe photoshop 7.

Here is what u get after doing the tutorial

Click to enlarge

You can either download that image and start working as i do or you can take the image of your own choice and transform the tutorial according to that.

So lets get started

Open the image in photoshop.

Colorizing the SKIN.

We will first colorize the skin then hairs, eyes, eyebrows, teeth gums and shirt.

1-Click the new adjustment layer button below the layer panel and select the Hue and Saturation..

2-Check the colorize and preview check boxes on Hue and Saturation dialog box and then set the Hue=26, Saturation=90 and lightness=0.

3-Rename the adjustment layer to “skin” by double clicking the name on layer panel.

3-Go to edit menu and select the fill , then choose black under use dropdown and make sure blending mode is set to normal and opacity is 100%.

4-Select the brush tool and make sure the foreground color is set to white and background color is black.

5-Go and start painting the all the skin parts, this you have to do carefully, if some color spills on the other parts outside then do not worry just turn the foreground color to black and then brush the parts where the color is outside the skin.

Get some thing like the following image

Click to enlarge

6-make sure the adjustment layer is still in selection and then set the blending mode to color and set the opacity to 30%.
(Note you can set the opacity and mode according to your own need….Just play with it to see how it produces different effects.)

This is what i get after that

……woooow quite horrified but face and skin parts are looking good,

if u do not like the face color you can go to blending options of the adjustment layer and fill it with any color you want and set the opacity according to your own need but as for this specific tutorial i am not going to do that.

Colorizing the lips.

Select the original image layer in the layer panel, in my case as i did not but the image on a separate layer…so its background layer.

For colorizing the lips you can repeat the steps from 1 to 4 of above section, on step 2 i used these values for lips.
Hue=0, Saturation = 100, Lightness = 0.

Rename this adjustment layer to “lips”.

At step 6 set the blending mode again to color and set the opacity to 50% .

see the result by clicking the above image.

Colorizing the teeth gums and internal borders of the eyes.

Repeat all the steps above….The hue and saturation values are

Hue = 20, Saturation = 100, lightness = +53.

Blending mode = color, Opacity = 50%.

This time brush the tooth gums and the internal eyes border.

Colorizing the Hairs and eyebrows.

Repeat all the steps in sec1

Hue and saturation values are…

Hue = 29, saturation = 32, Lightness= +70.

Blending mode= color, opacity = 18%.

Tip: it useful to only color the thickest hairs no need to color the each hair.

Colorizing the eyes.

For eye i used following settings.

Hue= 49, Saturation = 25, Lightness = 0

Blending mode = Color, Opacity = 100%.

Colorizing the Hair Clip and Cloths.

Use any Color you like……

This is what i got finally.

Comment on how do you like this……..and ask if any help is needed.

Thanks..

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well, this is a common problem when you convert an image to Gif animation the edges goes distorted sometime.So here are some soloutions to that.

Method 1(quick one)

To export the gif go to the file menu and then select save as web.
Press the 2-Up tab and click on the right half to select it.
On settings select GIF from the dropdown menu on the left top, then click the drop menu in top center on which the default name is “unnamed”and select the GIF 128 dithered…You should see the result on the right half…Note that you can select the other predefined settings there to get good result with minimum size, if its not the deal of size then 128 dither is the good.

I personally use always the 24bit PNG where i need the transparency in still images because the result produced by it is lot more better than the gif.

Method 2
Method 2 is that you play with the settings and see how its producing the results in the output.
Some tips related to the settings are here

The top left dropdown is used to select the format in which you want conversion

Lossy: it makes the edges more sharp and rough also effects on colors, this is useful when you are using the text layer on the transparent bg…so it looks more sharper. 0 means not lossy at all and 100 value means lossy to maximum.

The second left dropdown from top is used to select the color palette means to selecting the colors which would be used in the output, here is little description of the each palette types.

Perceptual
Creates a custom palette by giving priority to colors for which the human eye has greater sensitivity.

Selective
Creates a color table similar to the Perceptual color table, but favoring broad areas of color and the preservation of Web colors. This option usually produces images with the greatest color integrity.

Adaptive
Creates a palette by sampling the colors from the spectrum appearing most commonly in the image. For example, an RGB image with only the colors green and blue produces a palette made primarily of greens and blues. Most images concentrate colors in particular areas of the spectrum. To control a palette more precisely, first select a part of the image containing the colors you want to emphasize. Photoshop weights the conversion toward these colors.

Web
Uses the 216-color palette that Web browsers, regardless of platform, use to display images on a monitor limited to 256 colors. This palette is a subset of the Mac OS 8-bit palette. Use this option to avoid browser dither when viewing images on a monitor display limited to 256 colors.

Custom
Creates a custom palette using the Color Table dialog box. Either edit the color table and save it for later use or click Load to load a previously created color table.

So just play with them to get your desired look.

The third dropdown from top on left side is selecting the settings of how to blend the edges to background. There are three method just use them and see how they work.

The fourth important dropdown from the top on right side is matte, here u actually select the color on which u will put the image at the end, for example if you are planning to put the image on the website which has the background of some color then its always create the perfect result if you use that color as matte.

There are other option too which you can explore but these which i told u are used most commonly..

For any further question please do comment here…

Thanks

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