Changing black and white photo into color in a photoshop

Photoshop is a wonderful tool and if you are a little creative you can play with images to your heart's content. I was having some old black and white pictures of my father's childhood, and when I had time I sat with Photoshop and transform all of them to color. I thought I will let you know how I did because it is an interesting tutorial of Photoshop indeed in which you actually color the Black and White photographs.

Actually there are two methods to color a picture and you may use either of these per your needs. The first method is rather simpler in which you have to select the color you wanted to color a certain portion of the picture and then select the brush tool and paint the selected area. But this simpler method doesn't yield in a realistic picture and rather provides you with cheapo results.

Second method is relatively tougher one but end of it the pictures looks more realistic. I tried with this method. In this method you have to select a picture which you wanted to color and then change the image to color mode by image -> Mode -> RGB color. Zoom the picture to about 200% and select the magnetic lasso tool. Now click on the edge of any portion seen on the picture and after selecting a particular portion move the cursor around the edges of the object to make it a complete selection. Then press Ctrl+J to do “Layer via Copy” and then go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/ Saturation {Colorize: Yes}. Adjust the Hue/Saturation and Lightness until the object looks realistic and then set the blending mode of the layer to ‘color’.

You have to continue to do the same process with every portion/object in the picture. For coloring the background, just don't worry, as the objects are already colored and put them over the top of the background. So just select the background which includes the objects by clicking on the background layer and apply directly “Hue/Saturation” to it. Then click on Layer -> Flatten Image and after that Image -> Adjustments -> Auto Levels & Auto Contrast & Auto color. Save the picture. This way, you can color almost any number of B&W images.