AboutLizaL Expertise I've used Photoshop since the release of version 2. I taught college commercial art and graphic design for 10 years, and within that realm, taught Photoshop at every level, and with each successive product upgrade. My experience with Photoshop is thus extensive and well-rounded, from photo retouching to color adjustment to incorporating Photoshop and ImageReady into Web design. I am primarily a Mac user (since 1985), but am also PC-savvy.
Experience I've been a graphic designer for 22 years, was a national magazine art director, a designer for the Department of Defense, a college art instructor, and have my own freelance Web and graphic design business, LittleWorks (www.little-works.com). I've also worked for several printing companies, in both prepress and art.
Awards and Honors PICA award (Printing Industry of the Carolinas Award for the design of a media kit that accompanied a magazine I was art directing at the time)
Question Hi Lizal
How r u?plz tell me how can I color a black and white photo in Photoshop CS and enhance the quality of a photo
I will be thankful for ur coopration
Answer Hey Naveed,
There are a couple of ways here that aren't too involved; they both involve coloring parts of a photo, which is what I'm going to assume you're doing:
1. If you have a genuine black and white photo, one of the easiest ways is to first mask out the part that you want to color, then use Color Balance or Hue/Saturation to colorize the image. Here's how:
-- If your photo is a grayscale image, go to the Image pulldown menu, select Mode, and then select RGB.
-- Now you'll need to mask out the parts of the photo you want colored. The Quick Mask function is easiest for this.
There are two buttons located just below your big color swatches in the tool palette. Double-click on the one on the right, and make sure you have "Selected areas" ticked. Close that dialog box, and with that button on the right depressed, you're in Quick Mask mode. Now select a brush from tool palette, and paint the areas you want to color. When you're finished, click on the button to the left of the one you used to enter Quick Mask, and you should see the areas you "painted" show up as selections.
What you've just done is mask out portions of your photograph, the parts that you want to color. In using Quick Mask, you turn those areas into selections that you can make adjustments to.
Leave these selections active, and go to your Layers palette. Create a new adjusment layer by clicking on the little circular black and white icon on the bottom of the layers palette, and select Color Balance. Move the sliders to adjust the levels of color that will now show up in your selections.
Instead of a Color Balance layer, you could create a new adjustment layer, based on Hue and Saturation. Just click on the Create new fill or adjustment layer, and this time select Hue/Saturation from the pop-up menu. And make sure you have Colorize ticked in the dialog box. Move the sliders until you've adjusted the color to your liking.
2. Another neat trick is to take a color photo, then Desaturate it -- go to the Image pulldown menu, select Adjustments, then from there select Desaturate. Now select the history brush from your tool palette (located right below the regular brush -- the 5th tool down on the right), and paint over the parts of the picture you want to have color.
Since you only desaturated the picture, and didn't discard the color information, it's still there, so you can "paint" it back in with the history brush.
Hope this helps! You don't say which version of Photoshop you're using -- these examples were done in CS. Please post back if you need help with another version of Photoshop.
Now when you say "enhance the quality of a photo," that could mean a lot of things. If you like, please post back and explain exactly what you want to do in terms of enhancement, and I'll be glad to help!
