Tutorial for Black and White re-imagined in Color or the Colorize It assignment

So I decided to turn this classy lady:

in to a classy lady in color:

First off you need to choose a black and white photo. Originally I was going to do one of my Grandmother’s wedding photos but I realized I was too close to the subject of the photo and no matter what I did it looked wrong, soo I went on Tumblr and found this lady. I loved her hat and her positioning and right away knew how I would recolor the photo.

I used Gimp to recolor the photo.

So, step one:

Open Gimp.

Step Two:

Open whatever photo you chose in to Gimp.

Step Three:

Prepare your work space. You are going to need to open up the Layers dialogue box. That can be achieved by going to the Dialogue Tab and selecting layers:

Step Four:

Once you have your Layers window up, you are ready to start colorizing your photo. On the main Gimp window you have your foreground and background colors, the black and white boxes. Decide which  part of the photo you want to start coloring first. Once you have decided on the section, click on the black box and change the color to whatever you want that section to be.

After selecting your color you will see a box like this:

Select foreground color as indicated by the red oval.

Once you have your color selected, go to the layers tab and select new layer. Name the layer whatever area of the photo you are recoloring. Example, I did the hat first so I named my dark purple layer Hat. DON’T FREAK OUT! Your image will be totally filled with whatever color you chose.

Don’t worry, its going to be OK. Right click on your new layer in the layer window and select add layer mask.

After selecting layer mask another smaller window will pop up.

In this window you want to select Black (Full Transparency).

Now in the layers tab towards the top there is a drop down menu called layers mode. Click on the menu and select Overlay.

The Overlay feature allows the shades and the texture of the photo to really come through the color and make the coloring look more authentic. Now you are ALMOST ready to color. In the main Gimp window you are going to want to select the erase tool and use the scale option to increase or decrease the amount of area you are coloring.

It may seem counter intuitive to use the eraser tool to color a photo, I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to use the paint tool? Well, no, because what you are doing is erasing the black and white of the original photo so the color layer you created can show through.

NOW you are ready to color. I’d suggest zooming in so you can get around edges well and so your lines are crisp.

TIP: If you are coloring skin, its really hard to find a good color. If you are looking for a color similar to mine I used ebdeb9 as the HTML color notation in the color selection window. If you enter that in you can use the different hue, tint, saturation, etc controls to adjust it from there.

Once you are finished with your first color you are ready to move on to the next one. All you need to do is repeat the process all over again. Select a new color, open a new layer, create a layer mask, select overlay, and erase away!