Creative Use of Color - Beginning Photo Retouching and Restoration Using GIMP - page 129

Colorizing Black-and-White Images
I must admit this is one of my favorite editing activities. It's almost like working on a grown-up version of a
coloring book—but with much better results. Adding color to old black-and-white images is requested by my
clients fairly often, so it's a good skill to acquire for those offering their services professionally.

Tutorial 22: Colorizing Black-and-White Images
In this tutorial, we'll colorize an old family photo from the mid-1950s (Figure 5-23 ).

Figure 5-23. 1950s image perfect for colorizing

In this lesson, I'll provide the skin and hair values. The rest you can approximate, if you like. You don't
have to match the clothing, wall, or table covering exactly. You can use the Hue/Saturation dialog
(Image Menu ➤ Colors ➤ Hue/Saturation) on any layer you colorize to change the hue.
To colorize this image, follow these steps:

Open the image ( Ch5_colorize little boy ) found in the Practice Images folder.

1.

2. Duplicate the background (Shift + Control + D) and rename it Edit Layer.

3. Create a new layer (Shift + Control + N) and name it Skin (or Skin Tone). Change

the layer's blend mode to Color.

4. Using the Change Foreground Color dialog, pick a flesh color. You can double-

click the foreground color swatch and input the values R 247, G 202, and B 153 in
the Change Foreground dialog (Figure 5-24 ).