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When restoring old faded, stained or damaged photographs, the best practice is to first neutralize any stains using a black and white adjustment. The same photo corrected using Colorize feature of Photoshop Best Practices for Photoshop Colorizing Usually desaturating the image first is a good idea but is not always necessary. This technique is also useful when the original image is so badly faded or stained that regular color correction techniques such as adjusting curves or color balance fail. The original (top left), the photo converted to monochrome (top right), and the monochrome photo colorized by Photoshop’s AI (bottom). Three images of musicians Bekka Bramlett and Deanna Bogart.
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Then I colorized it using the Colorize Neural Filter to get the results that I wanted. This made a perfectly useable photograph. The first solution was to convert the image to monochrome using the Black and White adjustment layer. The photograph was made in club lighting which had only red and blue LEDs which could not be color corrected. The illustration below shows an original image of singer Bekka Bramlett and saxophonist Deanna Bogart. The Colorize feature in Photoshop can also be used for correcting faded or otherwise uncorrectable color images. A colorized image with no additional correction The same image with additional color correction The Usefulness of AI Colorization
#COLORIZE A BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO PRO#
For example, if a professional colorist would take two or three hours to hand color a photo with oil paint, the experienced pro using Photoshop and the brush tool might reduce the time to 45 minutes and with the Colorize feature, it could be completed in 15 minutes. My experience is that the Neural Colorize button dramatically reduces the time needed to colorize a black and white image, particularly portraits. The best practice is to continue by making a new layer for each color as before and adding or adjusting color as necessary. The other 80% of the colorized images are now ready for a little tweaking and finishing. The colorize feature in Photoshop gives perfect results about 10% of the time and totally useless results another 10% of the time.
#COLORIZE A BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO UPDATE#
The AI Neural Filters are being improved quickly and each update of Photoshop gives better and faster Colorizing results. Either way, additional work is usually needed.
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The output can be either a new colorized layer or a color-only layer. We also can select areas of the image in the preview window and tell Photoshop what colors to use by using the Color Picker. More complicated images with unusual subjects may not be so successful if we rely only on the Neural Filters. The Colorize feature does a good job of recognizing faces and applying good flesh tones as well as obvious skies, grass, and so forth. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
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A historic B&W photo automatically colorized by Adobe Photoshop’s colorizing neural filter. The Colorize button under Neural Filters looks at the image and compares it to millions of other images to decide what colors should be in the photo we have selected.
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The latest versions of Adobe Photoshop utilize Neural Filters that use AI to analyze a black and white photo and colorize it in seconds. In the digital era, we can make prints using 100% cotton paper that will last hundreds of years and print with permanent pigment ink that will last for centuries. The big advantage of hand-tinting using Photoshop over hand-tinting with oils is that the photo can be saved, resized, multiple prints and sizes, and even different color versions can be made. The basic idea is to make a separate color layer for each color, paint over the image using the brush tool, and then use the standard hue/saturation, color balance, and opacity tools to adjust each color individually. Colorists soon realized that the same techniques that worked with Marshall’s Oils and cotton tips could be used with Photoshop. Oil Layers to Photoshop Layersīy the time Adobe Photoshop was introduced in 1991, the need for hand-tinting and colorizing black and white photographs had been greatly reduced but was still sometimes used for vintage photographs or special effects. Adding permanent pigment oil paint on top makes them even more impervious to time and the elements. Black and white film and prints are permanent because they contain silver, not dyes. Color film and color chromogenic prints made from negatives are very susceptible to fading and changing colors, sometimes in as quickly as a few years. An added benefit was that oil paint-tinted photographs were permanent.
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