Primary Colorizing By Cyn
Because I have been promising to do it for months, and I finally got around to taking some screenshots while explaining it to someone, here it is. It works in either PaintShopPro or Photoshop, and I can't imagine why you couldn't do it in any image editor that supports layer masks, because that's pretty much all you need. It's very easy, once you get the hang of it, and imo, produces more lifelike, realistic results than colouring each object separately does.
Find itWe're not going to colour an entire image, instead, I'm going to take you from this:
to this:
(larger, cropped version here)
but you can easily apply everything in this tutorial to the entire image later once you've got got the gist of it- that's the beauty of doing it all in mask mode. Masks. Sigh. I love them.
First step- find great source. I don't always follow this rule myself; I have a thing for very old, fuzzy, damaged images that I can waste a lot of time restoring first, then colouring in dreamy, over-saturated jewel tones, just for fun and prettiness, but I can guarantee you a more believable result and a higher rating when you start with a large, undamaged, high resolution, even-toned source image. Your lo-res labours of love will generally tank in an actual contest, even if they are beautiful. Law of the jungle, baby.
Here's a large copy of the image I used for this tutorial, if you'd like to follow along. It's from a lovely old movie called "Shopworn Angel".
