Tutorials

Photoshop: Selectively colouring a photograph using the History Brush

A simple technique and one of many that can be used to knock out the colour in a picture and then put it back selectively to increase the impact.

Start with a picture that you want to use. The usual rules apply – don’t work with originals unless you are very good, work with a copy so the original is always there for you to go back to in the case of a disaster.
Select a picture that will, in your opinion, make a bigger impact with a bit of recolouring. This works very well with wedding photographs but can be used for a range of other areas such as product photography, artistic images, architecture etc.

And of course, no one is going to think that this was how you took the photograph so they will all know that it’s been worked on.
For this tutorial we will use some pots at a market stall in crete.

Looks good doesn’t it and it took less than five minutes to do.
Step 1
Open the image in Photoshop.

Step 2
Desaturate it. This is done through the menu bar: Images >Adjustments >Desaturate (or Shift – Ctrl-U by the keyboard). The image now looks black and white but as the Photoshop help file says:
The Desaturate command converts a color image to grayscale values, but leaves the image in the same color mode. For example, it assigns equal red, green, and blue values to each pixel in an RGB image. The lightness value of each pixel does not change.

So the colour image data is all there.

Step 3
Select the History brush. This is a tool that allows you to go back in time with Photoshop and here we use it selectively to go back and restore colour to areas of the image that we have desaturated.
Set the brush size to about 20 and make sure that it has hardness set to 100%

Step 4
Start painting over the areas that you want to restore colour to. Take care around the edges to make it as precise as possible and use the zoom functions in Photoshop to get as close to the action as possible. Changing the brush size to cope with large expanses of colour or fine details is also recommended.

This technique will save you hours and make something that will impress.

Images used in this tutorial are copyright KamPra productions but may be used if clearly attributed.

Connate Entries

• August 13, 2007 -- Carnegie Mellon Researchers Use Web Images To Add Realism to Edited Photos
• April 19, 2004 -- Audio: Using Digital equipment – a primer on the technology.

© 2008 An Unevenly Distributed Future.