How To Colorize Photo With Adobe Photoshop

I visited family recently and was shown an old photo of my great-grandfather, Robert Benyak, a Corporal in the Austro-Hungarian Army around 1900. Robert was from Bratislava, Slovakia.

Colorized Photo Made With Adobe Photoshop

I took a photo of the photo with my Samsung Galaxy S3 and then transferred it to my MacBook using the WiFi File Transfer app.

Once I had the image on my Mac desktop, I was ready to begin the operation with Adobe Photoshop CC.

The image was RGB, so I fiddled with it a bit and produced a sepia-tone image by converting it, first, to greyscale, to remove the color, and then to CMYK. I am more comfortable working in CMYK than RGB.

I adjusted the magenta and yellow Curves (command-M), until I achieved a sepia-tone quality.

Curves in Adobe Photoshop

In Living Color

Next, I colorized the image. I first had to to do some research to find out what colors were appropriate for a Corporal in the Austro-Hungarian Army around 1900. I looked at a lot of images and read a lot of blogs but I’m not positive I got it right.

Using the Pen Tool, I created a path to select the part of the image I wanted to work with.

Path in Adobe Photoshop

On the Right Path

Then, in the Path palette, I selected “Make Selection” and applied a little feather to “rough-up” the edges a bit to match the fuzziness of the photo.

Then, I selected “Select, Inverse” from the drop-down. With the new version of Photoshop, it seems it selects things in reverse for some reason.

Now, I had my item selected and I could adjust the colors using the Curves menu.

Once I had all that done, I exported the image for online use by converting it back to RGB.

Originally published at Jeff Macharyas.