I want to convert a black and white image to a full colour image

[greercat]

Hi, I want to convert a black and white photo into a full colour image so that it looks like a colour photo, is there anyway to do this with a plugin? If not how should I go about it?

Cheers,

Chris

 

[blueark]

If you have a color image in Photoshop, and you change to grayscale, a warning comes up asking if you want to discard color information. That means, once the color is gone, it's gone! More advanced users have even more complex methods of creating black and white images, so there is no way a plugin can know a certain shade of gray relates to a particular color. One shade of gray could just as easily be a red, green or blue!

If you want to color a photo, you'll have to do it by hand. One way to do this is to create a new layer, change the blending mode from 'normal' to 'color', and paint colors directly onto that layer. It won't be perfect, and you'll probably have to do a lot of adjustments afterwards, but it should give you a good starting point.

 

[gops15]

Using Hue and Saturation (Ctrl+U) option you can change the black and white image into color.

To color your black and white image select an area of your b/w image using lasso or marquee and change your foreground color to whatever color you want (Ex. if you have selected face using marquee or lasso, change the foreground color to cream)and press Ctrl+U and select colorize option which is in the right side of Hue and Saturation window. Now move the Hue/Saturation/Lightness bar to match the face color.