Hi! This is Mama Shan with the video tutorial to show you how to apply the colorization concept to an actual image. I suggest watching the pervious video, Photoshop mama’s colorization concept video before this one.

So, the task at hand is to change this black dress into a colored dress, and what we are going to do for efficiency’s sake is we are going to group a few adjustment layers inside of a group set.

So, I am just going to come down here to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the “create new group”. And, I can name this—I will just name it color dress. And right now, it is in the expanded state that arrow is pointing downward, which means that any adjustment layers that I create from this point forward are going to get nested inside this group. If the triangle was pointing to the right, it would be collapsed, and they would come outside of that group. So, I want to make sure that this is in the expanded state which is the triangle pressing downward. And, what we are going to do is we are going to mask the group. This is an efficient way to do this exercise and that way, we only have to do one mask that will apply itself to several adjustments.

So first, we need to create a selection and we are going to do that using the magic wand tool. You go select that over here in your toolbar and I have got the default setting of 32 for tolerance and anti-alias check, and contagious, and sample all layers. And, I am going to click in the black dress area, and then, I am going to hold down the Shift key and select this little area over here. And, we can zoom in a bit, I am holding down my spacebar and control key on PC. That would be spacebar command key or the apple key on the Mackintosh, and Shift key to just add that little edge to the selection. There is another one up here.

Since we are creating a mask, we can come back to this and edit it with brush later on if it is not completely perfect. But, this is just so that we get a general idea of what we are doing. I just hit control minus to zoom out on that. With the mask running or the selection running rather and the group set highlighted up here, the folder just click on the Add layer mask icon. And that is going to put a mask right on that folder there, which is showing white around where the selection is. So that means any adjustments that we put in this group are only going to be revealed in that white area.

And, we are going to start off with levels adjustments, so come down to the bottom the layers palette, and click on the create adjustment icon and choose levels. When the levels dialogue box opens up and notice how it inside of that group, we need to bump the black pixels to a gray luminosity. So, we go to the black output level slider because we want the output of this to be lighter. And, we move that over until we start seeing some gray where the black is, and again, this is all adjustable and nondestructive, we can come back to it later.

Now, we want to colorize this, so we will go again down to the bottom of the layers palette, and since we have levels highlighted. The next adjustment will come in on top of that but still within the group set. So, we are going to choose—oh! I am going to have to move this up a little higher so you can see it. We want to choose Hue Saturation, and when this dialogue box opens, immediately check the colorize box and you will start to get some color in that area. And, you are going to want to adjust the saturation maybe bump that up a bit and then decide which hue you want. I am going to go over here to blue, just round 220 or around that area and I am going to click OK.

Now, some of that brought color into it and you can see that I have just added the hue saturation layer without preceding it with the levels layer, that this is the type of color I will get. It is very dark and the task at hand is to get a brighter color. So, that is why we bump the luminosity over to a gray area.

Now, some of the details here look a little foggy so I am going to add a channel mixer adjustment layer to try and take care of that. And, how I am going to do that is to go over here—I know I can select it down here from the bottom, but I am going to show you where the top menu command is for these adjustment layers. Going through the top menu layer and we come over here to new adjustment layer, and we select channel mixer.

And, this gives me a dialogue box and what I am going to do here with the channel mixer layer because I want that to add contrast to this area of the new color. So, we are going to select the different blending mode for it and we can play with that a little later too. So, instead of having it come in at normal mode, we are going to have it come in at one of the contrast blending modes.

We are going to start off with overlay but then we will check what it looks like with some of this other contrast type blending modes. So, I am going to start it at overlay, and click OK. And, when that opens up, the first thing that you want to do is select the monochrome box here to put it into the output gray channel. And, I am going to zero the red channel out, but right now, I can just type in zero and hit tab, then type in zero for green, and then hit Tab. And for blue, I can bump that up a bit, I am going to bump the blue up since it is a blue shirt to a 100. And, this is the method that I would use if I had a red shirt, I would bump up the red up to a hundred.

And, I am going to click the preview up, and you can see just virtually doing that, that we brought in more contrast to the image. And, you can play around with the other source channels here, and get various amounts of contrast by doing that. But, then, that gets a little wiggly out there, pretty much, zeroing this out and it is not carved in stone. And, just having the channel that is most like your color at a little higher rate is going to introduce more contrast and give you a more realistic look.

Now, this are all nested neatly inside the color dress group and we only have to do that one mask. It affects everything that is contained in the contents. Now, as I said, we are going to click on this channel mixer layer and we are going to experiment with some of the other contrast blending modes. This is overlay and let me show you a trick here. If you click in this field where the blending mode is and hits your down arrow on a PC. That will cycle the blending modes.

Now, if you are in a Mackintosh, this does not quite work, you need to hold down your Shift key and use your plus and minus keys to do that to cycle. So, let me just go down there vivid light and again, you can play with the opacity of this adjustment layer too. Vivid light puts a nice amount of contrast in there but maybe we want to just bump it down to about 70 and that looks pretty good.

Now, I am going to collapse the group set and come back in here, and fix this areas that look a little sloppy with the brush. And, that is the beauty about masking, is it allows you to brush in a selection basically. So, what I am going to do is, get a little small airbrush here, I have lowered my opacity to about 43% and white is going to reveal the color areas. So, at a lighter opacity, especially since it is around the hair, I am just going to click a little bit in here and do that. White is revealing and black conceals, so I will just get in here a little bit with that, and click Shift click all around these edges a bit. We are going to switch to black here in this one little area here that I want to back off and conceal fringing. So, that does not look too bad, so we have been able to get a nice color from a black garment, and the beauty about this too is we can come back in here. And, for anyone of these adjustment layers, we can further modify it if we should need to.

If I want to change the particular hue, I would double click on the thumbnail of the hue saturation layer, and I would bump this over to another color. Now, I am going to go—to me it looks okay in some of this colors but let me go over to more to where the reds are here. And, then, I may want to modify my blending mode for my channel mixer layer first. Let us see what it looks like without it, see how flat it is.

That channel mixer layer works very nicely on this image like this. We can double click on it, and we can zero out the blue and we can bump up the red, and play with like that.

So, that is the basic concept with a little added insight on how to turn that black garment to a nice vivid color. Hope this helps you in your Photoshop tasks.