Colorizing & Repairing Old & Damaged Photos

This is a continuation of this tutorial or image restoration in progress.

Here I'm going to show you a simple but effective technique that will help you 'smooth out' areas while also 'colorizing' them. Oftentimes old photos will still have some color to them that you can use if they're not black and white and doing this can help restore their original integrity.

Create a new blank layer first by clicking on the new layer icon and then choose Color (or Hue) as the blending mode.

What you're going to do is simply sample from areas of color that should be there and use the paint brush to paint in or smooth out with that color on the color or hue blending mode.

 

For this you'll mostly stay on your paintbrush tool and press Alt to temporarily bring up the eyedropper/turkey baster from which you can continue to collect a new sample by clicking to get a new foreground color from which you can continue to paint with.

Use a nice soft brush and be sure to use your [ and ] keys to get a smaller and larger brush size fast.  Simply find areas such as this background which could use some smoothing and a similar color by alt clicking from a color point that you want to reproduce when on the brush and go ahead and paint onto the blank color blending mode layer. Using this method will allow you to retain the actual texture beneath (which IS important) because you don't just want to paint a COLOR or solid pixels onto the layer; you want to bring the original back to life and that's what the blending mode magic does.

When restoring photos remember that you'll have to take more time when working on actual people to get them just right whether you're cloning, healing, or using this method of restoring color. On backgrounds you can work a lot faster and they don't matter as much but on a real restoration job you'll want to take your time to get the (everything) color in this case just right.

Simply find a shade of color (b/c here we're in sepia toned) that represents the skin or hair whichever the case and use that as your new foreground color source and carefully paint in color smoothing. If you try different blend modes you'll actually see the painting turn into a more solid color like you're really painting in but once again, it's the blending mode that does the magic.

Continue to Alt click when on the brush to paint in areas that should have a certain color, always resampling when you go to another area. This will not only colorize the image but smooth out a LOT of image wear and inconsistencies found with older images.

Carefully use the clone stamp tool (taught in other tutorials and my Photo Restoration video training) to repair pixels. This can be used to correct blocky pixels also.

Once again, restoration is a time-consuming task but knowing what to do is important in making the most of your time and putting the care that you want to into restoring your images for loved ones (or loved clients) is worth the effort when you can operate smoothly within Photoshop).

Remember to create a duplicate copy of the original image anytime that you want to actually change pixels such as cloning

(unless you want to use all layers and clone onto a blank layer).

You can see this tutorial in realtime in action on my Photo Restoration & Curves DVD.

Here I'm using the Patch tool to continue to repair the good background with areas that are still blocky...it's all part of the whole image restoration process and having a background that looks smooth, ok and not distracting. But it's the actual portraits you'll want to spend most of the time restoring of the people themselves and this takes your utmost care.

Here I'm continuing to sample using the brush tool on my Color or Hue blending mode layer and painting over it to smooth out the colors.
 

Images like this that haven't been scanned properly or are just too damaged you can carefully get rid of these lines by using the clone stamp tool.

There's nothing quite like seeing an old image come back to life the way it was originally captured (actually there is but I'm pretty young so I can't fully respect it AS much as some of you b/c it's not MY favorite genre but at least I admit it../.photo restoration is a very important genre of digital imagery and Photoshop gives you the tools..I give you the knowledge...you have the TLC).

Here I'm sampling the yellow of the dress and painting that in and...

here I'm sampling the hand color and painting that in on my color blending mode layer. We are restoring what we can to make this image look like the original as best as possible b/c hey, they didn't have full color back in the early 1900's.

BTW, you can also colorize any black and white image this way using this technique of sampling (or choosing a color first) and then painting on the blending mode layer.

Try changing the blending mode to hue and see the slight difference.

Here I'm starting to colorize the pillar by grabbing (alt) one of the colors that is somehow still in the image and painting over it.

Try sampling another color if it's in the image to colorize or change/add colors to the drapes (in this case). This is how to colorize old photos using this technique and it's all in the blending mode so you retain the original texture of the image without just painting COLOR onto it.

Note I've created another new separate layer to do this colorizing on of the pillar.

Here I'm organizing these adjustment layers into a layer set.

Here you can see the before and AFTER after a little bit of work and using this great technique of brush/sampling/blending mode to smooth out and bring back some of the original color of the image to life.