Mbdisign.nl Forums

Welcome to this third tutorial, in which you'll be shown something about returning the original color to your black-and-white images in Photoshop. We'll be using this photo as our base image:



First of all, make a copy-layer of your original, colored picture by pressing Ctrl+J. Now use whichever method you prefer to turn the top-layer , which is the copy of the base layer, into a black-and-white picture. If you don't know how to do this you can take a look at a tutorial about this here:
http://www.mbdisign.nl/forum/viewtopic.php?t=364

For this tutorial I used the Gradient Map method. This means that I have to merge the top two layers, the Gradient Map layer and the copy-layer. Simply go to Layer -> Merge Down, or press Ctrl+E. Make sure you have the Gradient Map layer selected while doing this.

Make a new layer by going to Layer -> New -> Layer or by pressing Shift+Ctrl+N, and fill your new layer with a very weird or bright color, like neon-green. Open the layers window by pressing F7, and move the neon-green layer between the black-and-white layer and the original layer, like this:



Now select the black-and-white layer, which is on top in our example, and select your eraser tool. Set it to an appropriate size, and start erasing the parts that you want to return to their original colors. Because of the green layer you can easily see whether you missed a small part or not.
For the smaller parts and the details it is sometimes the best to use a smaller brush size, so that you don't erase any parts you want to stay black-and-white. When you are finished doing this your image will look something like this:



If you're satisfied with the parts you've removed, press F7, select the green layer and delete it. You will now see your black-and-white image with a part or several parts returned to their old colors, and you?re practically done.
Optionally, if you want to you can adjust the levels, contrast, hue, saturation and brightness of the down-most layer, to brighten up the colors a bit, or to change them. I added some extra saturation and I changed the hue for the final image, so that the colors look a bit better. Below is a comparison of the picture without the extra change of hue/saturation, and with the extra change.



Now as a final touch I'm adding a bit more contrast to the picture. This is, just like the step above, optional. Simply go to Image -> Adjustments -> Gradient Map, and choose a gradient that goes from black to white. Then go back to the layers window by pressing F7, and set the blending mode of the Gradient Map to Soft Light, and change to opacity to somewhere between 60% and 80%, though in some cases it looks better when the opacity is really low or really high.
Here is a comparison between with and without this extra step, with the final result on the right.



And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the very final result:



If you have any questions about this tutorial, simply send me a PM or post a message on the forum.