Expert: LizaL - 11/19/2005

Question
sir i want to colour a grayscale pic.kindly help me.  

Answer
Hello Chanzeb,

You can add color to a grayscale picture, but if you're working from a picture that never had any color information to begin with, you can't make it into a color picture, completely. You can change the mode to RGB or CMYK, but that only affects your options in Photoshop, not the image itself.

If your picture was always a grayscale picture (i.e., was shot in black and white), your options are rather limited. If the picture was originally a color picture that was converted to grayscale, it's easier.

1. To add color to a grayscale picture -- one that never had any color information in it --  you can decide which part of the picture you want to add the color to, and use the pen tool to draw a path around that part of the picture. Once your path is drawn, go to the Paths palette and click on the little triangle in the upper right of the palette. Select Make Selection... and the path will activate. Now go to your Layer pulldown menu and select New Layer. The selection will be on its own layer.

Go to the Image pulldown menu and select Mode, then RGB Color. Your image will not become color, but this will allow you to do the following step, which is to choose a color from your color picker or your swatches to be your foreground color. At this point you can fill your selected path with that color. Use the opacity slider on the Layer palette to adjust the tint.

You can also choose a color and use your brush tools to paint your selection.

This is obviously NOT a realistic way of colorizing a photo, but it's probably the simplest if the photo was always a grayscale.

2. If your picture was originally a color picture, you have a lot more options. Go back to the original, color version of the picture. From the Image pulldown menu, select Adjustments, then Desaturate. Now you can select the History brush from your tools palette to selectively paint over any area of the picture.

Since in this second example the image at one time had color information (that you discarded when you made it into a grayscale), using the History brush lets you recapture that color information, and you can do it selectively. But if the image never had color in it to begin with, you're rather limited as to how you can add color.

Hope this helps.

Lisa