If that doesn’t remove all of them, you can always create a layer mask to paint over any remaining flaws.ģ. You can do this easily by making slight adjustments to the Radius and Threshold levels until the little flecks are gone. If you’re working with an old photo, the first thing you should do is clean up the image. Then you can use layer masks to add the right colors to every part of the image. Get in the habit of creating a new layer before you touch your source image, so you always have the original. Whatever your motivation for colorizing, the basics are generally the same. “You appreciate the quality of light and dark.”
“The elegance of the photo is the simplicity of the color,” he says. Photographer Kenton Waltz loves colorizing black-and-white photos because he can choose which colors to include in an image and which to leave out. “I really like the more painterly, nostalgic look, rather than trying to make it look accurate,” she says. Painting by hand, she worked with a limited color palette, and she still prefers that simplicity.
Tina Tryforos, artist and teacher, began hand-coloring photos early in her career before going digital.
Contemporary artists still add color for those reasons. Photos with color just looked nicer on the mantle. In the 19th century most photographs were monochromatic, so people hand-colored them, often for purely aesthetic reasons.