Techniques and Examples of Using Photoshop to Color Black and White Pictures (Part 2)

13. Call the menu item: "Select" → "Load Selection". Select the intersection option in the popup dialog box to select the skin of this brightness range.

14. Select the LAB synthesis channel in the channel panel. Change the foreground color to L:90, a:15, and b:29.

15. Use brush tools to color the constituency.

16. Cancel the selection, start coloring the next brightness, select the L channel in the channel panel, set the foreground color to: LAB60, 0, 0, call the menu "Select" → "ColorRange", set the color tolerance value to 30. Press OK to make a selection.

17. Call the menu item: "Select" → "Load Selection". Select the intersection option in the popup dialog box to select the skin of this brightness range.

18. Select the LAB synthesis channel in the channel panel. Change the foreground color to L:60, a:22, and b:27.

19. Use brush tools to color the constituency.

20. Cancel the selection, start coloring the next brightness, select the L channel in the channel panel, set the foreground color as: LAB50, 0, 0, call the menu "Select" → "ColorRange", and set the color tolerance value as 50. Press OK to make the selection.

21. Call the menu item: "Select" → "Load Selection". Select the intersection option in the popup dialog box to select the skin of this brightness range.

22. Select the LAB synthesis channel in the channel panel. Change the foreground color to L:50, a:22, and b:23.

23. Use brush tools to color the constituency.

24. Start coloring the next brightness. Select the L channel in the channel panel, set the foreground color to: LAB35,0,0, call the menu “Select” → “Color Range”, and set the color tolerance value to 50. Press OK to make the selection.

25. Call the menu item: "Select" → "Load Selection", in the pop-up dialog box, select the intersection set option to select the skin of this brightness range.

26. Select the LAB synthesis channel in the channel panel. Change the foreground color to L:35, a; 23, and b:28.

27. Use brush tools to color the constituency.

28. Cancel the selection, start coloring the next brightness, select the L channel in the channel panel, set the foreground color as: LAB20,0,0, call the menu "Select" → "ColorRange", set the color tolerance value to 50. Press OK to make the selection.

29. Call the menu item: "Select" → "Load Selection", select the intersection option in the pop-up dialog box, select the skin of this brightness range.

30. Select the LAB synthesis channel in the channel panel. Change the foreground color to L:20, a:21, and b:26.

31. Use a brush tool to color the constituency.

32. At this point, the first job of painting has basically been completed and the constituency has been cancelled.

However, the problem is that the color transition between different brightnesses is very hard and the next step is to perform natural transition processing.
33. In the channel control panel, select a channel, call the menu command: "Filter" → "Blur" → "GaussianBlur", adjust the parameter Radius value, to see if there is traces of the skin is good (usually in 12 ~ 16 )between.

Do the same for the b channel. In the channel panel, select: LAB synthesis channel viewing effect. The same method can be used for other parts of the image: hair, clothing, lips, etc., and will not be described in detail here.

For people who have no coloring experience, how to determine the color of a certain brightness is a difficult task. At the beginning, you can open a color photo of a person with similar characteristics (almost age person), and turn to Lab mode. Use the mouse to detect the corresponding reference value in the picture. The value can be seen in the Info control panel.




Source: Guangdong Press and Publication Senior Technical School