Painting by colour, posting by numbers...

Adding colour to black and white
Final Edit

This is post 100.
I had never really thought about such a milestone before. I began my blog on 10th August 2009, a few months after my dream of photography had been conceived, feeling fresh and inspired as an enthusiastic, yet curious new born child. At that time, the memory and awareness of the future is simply unknown and I suppose I felt this way about my blog. I took each post in its stride and helped it grow and age and develop. I have developed by writing it and showing my pictures and expressing my thoughts. But now reaching such a milestone, I can reflect on my progress so far and what I have learned and what I want to continue to learn. This post will be the many of hundreds in years to come, but for now, I am celebrating my passion and determination through photography.

At the beginning I mentioned a lot about collecting photography magazines and entering competitions and about six months ago I had a look through the years-worth that I had collected and cut out some photoshop tutorials and inspiring photographs for me to go back one day and perhaps have a go at developing my editing skills. I would say I am quite confident with photoshop, with some bells and whistles yet to be discovered. I purchased another photography magazine today Digital SLR Photography and noticed some tutorials that I took interest in. I got home and had a go.

The writer of the tutorial explains how many of us and transform a colour photograph into black and white, almost instantly, but how many of us can turn a monochrome image into colour? This was the task and this was the challenge.

I began with a colour image that I transformed to black and white, then removed the original colour image from photoshop, as not to cheat. I then followed the step-by-steps and created some of my own. The final image is above, but how did I do it?

Let's take a look.

Original Image

Converted to black and white

Paint brush tool with a skin colour
covering the whole face

Go to the Blend Mode in the Layers palette and
change to colour

Lasso Tool and erase the skin colour
unwanted around the eyes

Select suitable hair colour
and repeat Blend Mode
(step 4)

This Blend Mode and colour selection is then repeated, for the eyes, lips, clothes and background until you are happy with your result. 

Simples.

I completed this tutorial using Photoshop CS4.

Want to visit my Flickr photostream with the featured photos in my blog and more then click the following link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brown_eyed_dreamer/