Beginner’s Guide to Colorizing Old Photographs in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction & Class Overview: Restoring an old image and bringing it back to its former glory is a unique and special experience, and the process which is easy to lose yourself in as you spend countless hours delving through old family albums and lovingly removing the dust and scratches which aged photos picked up over time. And as part of the process, colorizing black and white photographs is a great way to bring new life to old pictures which need restoring! I'm Dominic, a photographer, designer and teacher with a passion for restoring and editing old family photographs. By restoring these old pictures, I transform them from old prints trapped in an album into heirlooms to be appreciated by all of the family, no matter where they are in the world! I recently decided to put Adobe’s new Neural Filters through their paces, to see how capable they are and how AI can speed-up my workflow when restoring and colorizing old photographs. And in this class, I will be exploring Adobe Photoshop’s Colorize Neural Filter to colorize old black and white photographs. In this class, I will cover how to capture your images for colorization, using the Colorize Neural Filter’s settings to create your desired look, outputting the filter’s results for non-destructive colorization workflow and finalizing the look of your colorized photographs manually to get the best possible results. This class is beginner-friendly and is designed for everyone who is interested in colorizing old black and white photographs. To follow along with this class you will need the latest Creative Cloud version of Adobe Photoshop and a digitized black and white photograph, which you want to colorize. So whether, like me, you have some family photographs you want to restore and colorize to surprise your family members with, or someone who is excited about working with AI and wants to get some tips for getting started with Adobe Photoshop’s Neural Filters, or a student, photographer or editor who wants to add a new technique to your creative toolkit, this class is for you! So let’s get started and bring new life, through color, to your old black and white photographs! 2. Reviving Old Photos Through Color: I've always enjoyed restoring old photographs and seeing the world as things were many years ago. Photographs, whether personal or historic documents, allow us to time travel by offering us a glimpse of the world from the past. And the still image has, for most of us, become an intrinsic part of our identities because it connects us with our past and family members who are no longer around. Recently, I got my hands on a collection of photos taken by my late grandfather and his family in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Many of the photos are from small contact prints or have become dusty and scratched over the intervening decades. So before colorizing, I have restored them, removing all of the imperfections and marks time has rendered onto their emulsion. If you would like to learn more about this part of the process, then I have another class about retouching old photographs using Adobe Photoshop’s various image retouching tools. In this class, however, we will focus solely on the image colorization process and related techniques. We will start by covering how to best capture images for colorization and then dive into Adobe Photoshop’s Colorize Neural Filter, where we will explore its strengths and weaknesses, before looking at how to further work with your colorized images in Adobe Photoshop to perfect your results. Next, before starting the colorization process, let's have a quick look at your class project. 3. Your Class Project: As with all Skillshare classes, student projects and sharing your work with the creative community is at its core. For this class, your project is to colorize a black and white photograph. This does not have to be an old scanned photograph. If you just want to learn about these techniques and the process, then you can use a black and white digital photograph. Basically to use Adobe Photoshop’s Colorize Neural Filter any black and white digital photo will do. If though you do not have a suitable black and white digital photograph to use, don't hesitate to use some historic photographs which you can download in high resolution via the links I've shared in the Project Description. Having completed your project, don't hesitate to share it with us in the Projects tab for this class! This is where we get to see all of the fantastic work you produce and give you feedback. And work we really love we sometimes feature in our Student Spotlight galleries. If you've got a moment, be sure to check out the projects created by other students there as well. So without further ado, let's begin with getting our photographs ready for colorization. 4. Capturing Your Images for Colorization: Before getting started with the process of colorizing an image, we need to look at how to best capture images for colorization, because the higher the quality, the better the results produced by the Colorize Neural Filter. Low quality images will adversely affect the results which the Neural Filter is able to produce. Basically, the more information you're able to capture in your image and the higher the quality of that information, the better the results produced when being processed with the Colorize Neural Filter. How you capture your image for restoration and colorization really depends on the equipment and resources you have available. In the best case scenario, you have got the original photographic negative and the dedicated negative scanner. These machines are able to scan negatives at very high resolutions. Some flatbed scanners have a basic negative scanning facility built into their lid. These are almost as good as dedicated negative scanners, but do have some limitations because they are a compromise solution. When scanning negatives using a dedicated negative scanner and with the correct settings, the only real limitations are those of the original photograph and the condition of the negative, which might have become scratched or dusty over the intervening years. Of course, using a dedicated negative scanner is not always possible, especially if you do not have the photograph’s negative. In this case, you might find yourself photographing or scanning a print. Prints are best scanned using a high quality flatbed scanner. When putting your photographs in the scanner, it is important you get the photograph as flat as possible. Now, this might seem a little obvious, but old photographs, like some of those which I have been dealing with recently, often bend and warp over time, depending on the conditions in which they have been stored. If you find yourself in this situation, you can try gently resting several heavy books on top of the print when it is in the scanner. When using a flatbed scanner, if the surface of the print is not in contact with the scanner’s glass, then that area of the print may scan out of focus or softly. If you do not have a dedicated negative scanner or flatbed scanner, then don't fret, because there are a number of methods you can use to capture your photographic print or negative. Simply photographing your print is perhaps the easiest. You can do this by tacking it to the wall and photographing it using your phone or camera in as neutral light as possible. Unless you have got proper lighting equipment, like a flash head or studio lighting kit, avoid photographing the print with the camera’s or phone’s flash because these tend to produce flattish results. Also, watch out for any strong lighting sources, for example, lamps in the background or daylight coming in through a nearby window, which can reflect light off the photograph’s surface. Neutral light means diffused and indirect. When photographing a print tacked to the wall, you'll need to get as close as the focus on your camera allows and then maybe crop the image afterwards. Of course, when using a camera, how close you can focus depends on the focal length of the lens and the camera's image sensor size. Mobile phones with their tiny sensors, which are typically of inferior quality, actually have an advantage here because they can focus a lot closer. Nowadays, however, scanning your negatives or photographing them off the wall are not your only options. There is now several apps which utilize your phone's camera to capture negatives and prints. For example, FilmBox is an app which you can use to scan your negatives for free using their basic account. And with an extra subscription you can have access to their more advanced tools. All of this said, no matter what method you use to capture your negatives or prints, scanning or photographing them in the highest possible resolution is paramount. And this is where dedicated negative scanners usually have an advantage, because they are specially designed to scan a small area, but in an extremely high resolution! For example, my Plustek OpticFilm 8100 negative scanner can scan at 7200 DPI and in 24 bit color, which is far higher than my flatbed scanner. To summarize, scanning or capturing your images in the highest possible resolution and quality will make both the process of colorization and image restoration easier and enable you to produce better results. Negatives scanned using a dedicated negative scanner or black and white digital photographs will produce the highest quality results. Low quality images will produce poorer results in Adobe's Colorize Neural Engine. Next, let's have a look at preparing your black and white images for colorization. 5. Preparing Your Photo for Colorization: With your scanned negative or photographed print ready, the first thing to do is open it in Adobe Photoshop so it can be prepared for colorization. If you are working with a copied or scanned photograph, then before colorization, you'll most likely need to do some restorative work to remove any dust, scratches and imperfections. I recommend this is done before colorizing the image, but it can be done afterwards or during the process if necessary. These processes, however, I will not be covering here, as I have another class available where I work through the basic theory and technical processes behind photographic image restoration. Now, before we get started with the colorization process, there are a couple of things to check. Firstly, we need to ensure the image is in the RGB color mode, otherwise Adobe's Colorize neural engine will not work. You can see your image’s color mode next to its name in the tab here, or by going to the Image menu and checking what color mode is selected under Mode here. If your image is set to Grayscale, then select RGB from the menu. This action will not convert your black and white image into a color image, but will allow Adobe Photoshop to use colors when colorizing your image. If your image has any layers or adjustments applied, then you might get a message like this asking you if you want to flatten your image when converting it to the RGB color mode. However, this is unnecessary and you do not need to flatten your image. Besides setting the color mode correctly, at this point you might also want to crop, resize or straighten your image. It is best to get this part of the process done before colorizing your image, because removing areas from the image, for example, damaged margins from where your prints might have become folded or creased, will increase the overall quality of the filter’s final output. You can crop your image using the Crop tool. You can select the desired preset aspect ratio from this menu or hit ‘Clear’ and produce a custom crop unrestricted by pre-determined aspect ratios. Whilst cropping you can also straighten your image using the Straighten tool and drawing a line along elements which you need to be horizontal or vertical in your photograph. Or you can manually rotate your image as required. And when you are ready to apply your crop, hit ‘Enter’. If you need to resize your image, press Command+Shift+I, or Control+Shift+I in Windows, to open the Image Size dialog and change the size to your desired settings. Scanned images usually have very high resolutions, but their physical dimensions are often set to those of the scanned source material. So resizing your image to a large size but at a lower resolution, for example, 300 DPI, is a good idea, especially if you are planning to print your colorized photograph afterwards. So get your photograph ready, and next we can get started with the Colorize Filter. 6. Getting Started with the Colorize Filter: With your photograph opened and prepared, you are now ready to begin coloring it. Start by selecting the layer with your photograph in the Layers panel. Or if you have multiple layers in your document, including retouching layers and adjustment layers, select all of the image layers you might have and convert them into a Smart Object. This will help you avoid running into any issues with the neural filter and allow you to have a foolproof non-destructive workflow. If you have any adjustment layers, keep them outside and above your new Smart Object. Rename your new Smart Object to keep things tidy and select this layer. Then go to the Filter menu and select Neural Filters. This will open Adobe Photoshop’s Neural Filters Gallery where you can download, select and apply the various different filters to your image. To colorize your image, download and turn on the Colorize filter. When you apply this filter, your computer will likely take a moment to process things whilst it colors your image. In this panel here, the settings for the Colorize neural filter will open. These you can use to control the filter and what you choose to output. And we'll take a look at each of the settings here in a moment. Besides all of the settings for controlling the filter’s effect, there are a couple of useful tools tucked away at the bottom of the Neural Filters panel. These are the Layer Preview control and the Show Original option. Show Original does exactly what the name suggests, and when you click on this option, it will show you an uncolored original. The Layer Preview can be used to jump between displaying all layers with the filter’s effect or the individual layer you had selected when you opened the Neural Filters, which should be your image layer. This can be useful if you're working with a file which has some adjustment layers above your image layer and want to preview either the final overall result with all additional adjustments in the document or just the colorization effect on the image without additional adjustments. I will keep this set to All Layers. When you first apply the Colorize filter, you might get good results right away, but there are quite a few ways to adjust the effect. So let's have a look at each of these settings, starting with the Filter Profiles and Profile Strength setting. 7. Filter Profiles & Profile Strength: Once your computer has finished processing the Colorize Filter's initial output, you can adjust the filter’s settings to better suit your image and the look that you want to create. Firstly, in the Adjustments section you have a range of Profiles which can be used to quickly change the filter’s parameters. Options include None, which produces neutral looking colors, Retro High Contrast, Retro Blue Brown, Retro Light Yellow, Retro Purple Yellow, Retro Bright, Retro Red, Retro Green, Retro Faded, Retro Denim, Retro Dark, and Retro Brown. There are no hard and fast rules here with regards to what Profile to use. It really depends on your image and how you want it to look. So if this is your first time experimenting with Adobe's Colorize Neural Filter, then work through all of the filter’s profiles and find one which works for you. These profiles are specially designed to work with and mimic old prints, so you're bound to find something which will work with and enhance your image. If you have selected a filter profile, you can control the strength of the filter using the Profile Strength slider. The slider’s default setting is in the middle or 50%, and moving it to the right will increase the strength of the filter profile, whilst moving the slider to the left will decrease its strength. Again, play around with this the slider and get your image and the strength of the filter looking just right for your image. Selecting a suitable profile is an important step in coloring your image, but you can also further fine-tune the saturation and color balance in your image using these settings, which we'll be looking at in the next part. 8. Saturation & Color Balance Controls: Once you have chosen a profile and set its strength, you can further fine-tune the look of the colors in your photo. Underneath the Profiles and Profile Strength control is a Saturation slider and several Color Balance controls. The Saturation slider can be useful because old photographs, when colorized, often have overly saturated colors. Or in some cases can be desaturated and need their colors boosting. And likewise, sometimes the color balance can be a little off, even when you have carefully selected the Profile. Or maybe you want to deliberately push the color balance of your photo in a particular direction, for example, giving your image a faded reddish look as if the acid in the photographic paper has reacted with its environment. And these controls will allow you to take some control of the image colorization process. If you are not experienced in using the Color Balance tools, the best way to start is by playing around and moving the sliders. Each of the sliders deals with a pair of complementary colors, and the rule to remember is that if all of the sliders are set to the same value, they will compensate for each other and create a neutral look without any hue shifts. So if you want to make changes to the color balance, you'll need to offset the sliders from each other. Having some understanding of color theory here is definitely helpful, but you can get good results by experimenting with and moving the sliders around to different positions and combinations to create the desired effect. Just remember we are not striving for perfection and there is room for experimentation and artistic expression! When colorizing an old black and white photograph things will never look totally realistic. And it's okay to mimic old photographs to deliberately give your photo an old feel. So when working with these sliders and profiles, concentrate on getting the general look of the colors to your liking and make sure the coloring in more complex areas like skin tones is generally correct. Next, let's have a quick look at the Color Artifact Reduction and Noise Reduction Options. 9. Color Artifact & Noise Reduction: After you have finished setting up your Colorize Neural Filter, there are several additional controls to explore for fine-tuning your look. These are Color Artifact Reduction and Noise Reduction. The Color Artifact Reduction control allows you to adjust the coloring in your image by smoothing some areas and sharpening others. When set to maximum or high values, it also affects the general coloring, as it tends to somewhat blend the hues together. But with lower values, 9 times out of 10 you'll not notice much difference, if any, to your image. By all means, play around with it, but don't fret if you don't see any meaningful effect. On the other hand, the Noise Reduction control can appear to have an unwanted effect on the overall image quality, texture and tone, especially when you crank it up to its maximum value. But don't be discouraged by what you see, as there is a way of making it work to your advantage. In order to do so, you need to make sure that you don't bake this effect into the actual image layer. This you can do when outputting the filter’s results later by checking this tick box. We will look at Output Options in more detail a little bit later, so for now, let's just check this box and see what the Noise Reduction slider actually does. When you check this box, you'll see the colors used to colorize your photograph, but not the details of the actual photograph. And now if you zoom in to see the details and start changing the Noise Reduction value, you'll notice that it creates smoother coloring and blends the colors together when you increase its value, so is less or no color noise. It does not affect the coloring as much as the Color Artifact Reduction slider does, but just makes all of the transitions smoother. So play around with it, but pay attention to what happens to any edges of the elements colored in different colors. As you cannot easily preview the effect at this stage without applying the filter, you can save making the Noise Reduction changes until just before outputting the results. And if you want to work on the filter’s settings more, simply turn it back down to zero and uncheck this box to see the colorized preview yet again. Even when you use these two controls to compensate for blotchy coloring, they won't go far if you have got areas with uneven coloring where AI has got it wrong. Luckily, there are a couple of ways to address these problems. One of them being the Manually Color Image option here, which we'll look at in the next part. 10. Manually Color Image Tool: Auto coloring options give you a good starting point for colorizing your photographs, but sometimes, actually pretty often, you can get some patchy results, especially in areas which should have a consistent hue. These can be addressed either later on when finalizing the look of your colorized photograph after applying the filter, which is my preferred method as it gives you more control, or you can try to fix some of the coloring issues using the Manually Color Image tool available in the Neural Filter. The Manually Color Image option here is not apparent. It is almost as if Adobe did not want you to spot it. To use this tool, simply click on an area where you want to adjust the colors in this preview and pick a new color using the Color Picker. Photoshop will automatically select the adjacent areas of similar color to replace. You can then move the point around to see how it changes what areas are affected, and you can also change the color, or increase or decrease the strength of the coloring from the selected point, or remove it. This tool is rather fiddly and it seems somewhat underdeveloped, and I find it is often easier to adjust the colors afterwards manually, which is what I'll be covering shortly. So use this option if you really want, but generally whilst using the filter, just make sure you get the majority of the colors correct, especially those in tricky areas or in skin tones using the other controls and sliders. And when you are ready with the initial effect, next it is time to output the colorization results for further development. And that’s what we'll look at next. 11. Output Options: We have now reached the important part of the process, the Output Options. Adobe's Neural Filters, partly by design, but also limited by their current state of development and power, are meant to complement any traditional colorization process. So when it comes to outputting the final results from the neural filter, it is best to export it as a new color layer, meaning you'll be able to edit and replace the colors afterwards at ease. To do this, select the ‘Output as New Color Layer’ tick box. An option here will automatically change to ‘New layer’. As we've seen earlier when working with the Noise Reduction slider, when this box is checked, the image displayed will change and you'll see the colors Adobe Photoshop has painted over your image. Once you select ‘OK’ and return to Adobe Photoshop’s standard workspace, these colors will be displayed as a new layer with the ‘Color’ Blending Mode selected, creating the color effect over the layers below. Working this way will mean that you can easily change the colors afterwards because all of the coloring is contained on a separate layer. If you uncheck this box, you'll see other available Output Options here. These don't really allow you to work easily with the coloring manually afterwards as they either merged the coloring with the image layer or apply the effect as a Smart Filter. These can be useful if you don't need to do any further work afterwards and you are happy with what you see here. However, I cannot see any disadvantage in outputting the Colorize Neural Filter as a new color layer and therefore recommend working this way. And outputting this way is required if you want to follow along in the final part of this class where we will explore working with the colors after the Colorize Neural Filter has been applied. So when you are happy with the results of the Neural Filter and have made any final changes to the Noise Reduction settings, click on the ‘OK’ button here to apply the colorize effect and exit the Neural Filter workspace. And next, we can have a look at finalizing the look of the colors beyond the Colorize Neural Filter. 12. Finalizing Your Newly Colorized Image: Adobe's Colorize Filter, particularly at its current stage in development, is really designed as a starting point. When colorizing an old black and white image, it will get you perhaps 80% of the way there. However, it is not perfect and it will frequently make mistakes with particular colors. I have noticed through using the filter that greens and blues appear to be particularly vulnerable to being mistaken by the neural engine. That said, there are a number of areas which the neural engine seems to excel in, like dealing with faces and skin tones, which are arguably very complex and perhaps the hardest thing to get right. Most of my post-neural filter work on colorized images is to fix erroneous greens and blues. I have had to do relatively little work, thank goodness, on skin tones. So let's have a brief look at working with colorized images post application of the Colorize Filter. As we have output the results of the filter as a new color layer, you will now see the color layer in the Layers panel above your original black and white image layer. The new color layer has the ‘Color’ Blending Mode selected by default. This displays the colors in the color layer overlaid on top of the black and white image layer, creating a color image effect. If you're not happy with a particular color in your image, you can now work with the color layer and change the colors on it. Firstly, I recommend duplicating this layer, so you have a back-up, and then hiding it. This way you can easily revert back to the filter’s results without needing to set it all up again if you mess things up. With the layer backed up, select the visible color layer, then select the Brush tool and start painting onto the layer with any desired color. The color you paint with will replace the color in the color layer. You can select a color to paint with in the Color Picker, or for more realistic results, you can use the Eyedropper Tool to sample colors from another part of the image. When working with the Eyedropper tool, make sure you have the ‘Current Layer’ selected in the Options bar and check ‘Show Sampling Ring’ option here. This will allow you to preview the color you are sampling with the Eyedropper tool. To find the right color to sample, keep the mouse button pressed and move the cursor around until you are happy with the selected color. Quick tip: with the Brush tool selected, if you press and hold the ‘I’ key while sampling the color, as soon as you release the key, you should automatically switch to the Brush tool and can then paint on the new color. The great thing about working with brushes to paint colors onto the photograph after you've applied the Colorize Neural Filter, is that you have a lot of control over the changes you are making, and there are many different settings which you can use to your advantage. First of all, you can change the brush head, although in most cases you'll probably be working with a standard soft round brush and controlling its size and hardness to best work with the elements in your photograph. You can change both the size and hardness through this panel or memorize and use these shortcuts to change the settings faster. So pick the size of the brush based on the size of the element you want to recolor. And I'd recommend using a Soft brush with the Hardness set so somewhat closer to zero or well below 50 to avoid creating harsh edges and unrealistic coloring. But play around and experiment with these settings and find something which works for you and the details in your image you are colorizing. There are also several more important settings in the Options bar which affect how the brushes work. These are the Opacity and Flow settings, and you can use these to build up the color whilst painting and blend new color with the colors already existing on the color layer. Opacity controls the maximum opacity you can create with the color with a single brush stroke before releasing the mouse button and starting a new stroke. If you turn it down and start painting over the same area, eventually, after a few new strokes over the same area, you will be able to get the full opacity of the color. If you want to make very subtle and controlled changes, you can use it on its own or in combination with the Flow settings. But I find that to be able to work faster, you can just keep the Opacity set to 100 and use the Flow with all of its advantages. Flow works in a similar way to Opacity, but with the difference that if you turn it down and then start brushing on the same area, you don't need to release the mouse button to build up the effect, you just need to move the brush around. And if you enable the Airbrush Effect here, not even that: you can just press and hold the mouse button without moving and you will see the colors build up. So to be able to gradually change the coloring in a specific area, I would recommend setting the Opacity to 100, Flow to about 10% and then enabling the Airbrush Effect here. And then start carefully painting and blending the colors and picking colors using the Eyedropper tool as you go. Adding the finishing touches and manually adjusting the colors in different areas of your photograph can be a long process, but ultimately it is up to you how much time you want to spend perfecting the colors. So take your time getting your colors just right! And in the next part we'll talk about saving and exporting your colorized photographs. 13. Saving & Exporting Your Photo: Once you've finished colorizing your photograph, it is time to save and export it. As with any complicated image files created in Adobe Photoshop, you might consider saving a working file for future renditions of your work. Working files can be saved as a PSD, or Photoshop document, which will contain all of the image’s layers, including your new color layer. This means you'll be able to edit your image in future. For your final output, however, for example, printing or publishing online, you'll want to go to the File menu, select ‘Save a Copy’ and save your image in the JPEG or TIFF format. Generally, I would follow the logic of JPEG for digital display, and a flattened TIFF for high quality print applications. So save and export your colorized photograph in your preferred format. And next, let's wrap up this class with some final thoughts and conclusions. 14. Final Thoughts & Conclusion: Ultimately, it will be interesting to see how these tools develop over the next several years and whether we will reach the point where image colorization is automatic and requires relatively little human interaction. At this stage, I honestly have mixed feelings about the prospect because I actually really enjoy the process of restoring and colorizing old photographs. However, the ability to automatically colorize old images opens up the process to everyone and will mean more photographs being restored and shared, whereas at the moment so many old photographs are just sitting there in people's albums or in boxes in the attic gathering dust, because the technical processes for image restoration and colorization are a niche specialization. What are your thoughts on the subject? Would you like to see the process being fully automated? Or do you like me enjoy the process of manually bringing old photographs to life? Don't hesitate to share your opinion by leaving a comment in the Discussions tab for this class. So that's it for this class! I hope you have found this class useful and really look forwards to seeing your colorized images. Be sure to share your work in the Projects & Resources tab for this class, and I will be happy to provide feedback. And if you share your work on Instagram, please tag us @attitudecreative so we can easily find your posts. If you have enjoyed this class, then you can help us out and make it easier for others to discover this class by leaving a review. If you want to learn more about photographic processes and restoring old photographs, then be sure to check out my other photography classes. I have a class all about image retouching and restoration in Adobe Photoshop and several classes where I explore both color and black and white digital image editing in Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop. Thank you for joining me in this class! I hope you have enjoyed the process and look forwards to seeing you in other classes soon!