Hi, this is Mama Shan with a video tutorial to show you the concept behind colorizing things that are pure black or things that are pure white. It is very easy to replace color when the luminosity of the color is falling into a gray area. It is a little more difficult to do that when the pixels are pure black or pure white so I am only going to show you the concept behind this and this is going to help you with those challenges of colorizing objects.

So I am just going to create a new document here. And I will just use the default Photoshop size and click Ok. And then I am going to select the gradient tool and select black to white gradient and click Okay. And I am just going to drag the gradient starting about a third of the way over, hold my shift key down and go about like that so that I have a black area of the gradient, a gray area and a pure white.

Now, what happens when I try to colorize this using an adjustment layer and that is one of the methods that you can use to colorize underlying pixels. I am going to select, let me move this layers pallet up so you can see my selection, I am going to click on the add fill adjustment and go to hue/saturation. When hue/saturation box opens up I am going to click the colorize box and up the saturation a bit and you can move the hue to choose any color you want.

Notice when I do this, I am going to click Ok, that the only area that is really being affected by the new colorization is the gray pixels underneath, let me shut this off, you see it is gray. Now, if I want that green to show up over the black, I have to adjust those black pixels to look more gray and this is how you would do that. I am going to click on the background and I am going to add a levels adjustment layer.

And when the levels box opens up, remember I am targeting the black. So what I need to do is take the output levels black slider which is under pure black right now and move that over until it is at a grayer pixel. And that is when we start to see the color coming in over there. Now let me put this back. If I open up the mid tones on the input slider by moving my gamma to the left, all that is affecting are those mid tones. Let me put that back to one.

The same thing with the highlight slider. That is just increasing the area of the highlight so that is not working so well. Now if I wanted to colorize the white area, I have to do the opposite, I have to come down to output levels and move this white point slider over towards a darker gray. Look right under here. This is your key, this gradient bar here, so my output for white I want to be gray so I move it to a grayer pixels and now you can see that color popping up in the white area.

So that is the basic concept that you would use when you run across items that you want to colorize that are white or black. You would use this particular method to bump it up to a luminosity where it is gray and then that colorization would take effect. I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and it helps you out in your future needs with Photoshop.