In this tutorial you will learn how to Turn Old Photos into Realistic Colors. This tutorial will cover general strategies to making old photos look great, including blemish repair, color correction, etc.

First, start by duplicating your layer. Having a reference layer of the original photo is always a great idea.

Continue by cropping out any of the damaged frame. To further repair any blemishes or scratches, you can use the combination of patch tool along with content-aware fill and clone stamp tool.

To remove any last minute scratches or dusts, what you can do is right click on your layer and click convert to smart object. Then go to Filter - Noise - Dust & Scratches. Keep the radius of the dusts to be removed around 2-3 pixels to avoid any distortion. Keep threshold around 30.

Next is correcting the colors. This might be the most tedious part of the task. First click on adjustment layer - Black and White, to neutralize the colors. Add a levels adjustment layer to add some contrast to the image.

At this point, you can switch to CMYK color to make it more compatible for Printing as well as Coloring your photo. Click Merge when asked.

Coloring your photo basically means painting over the photo manually. To do this, the best approach is to create various layers for each color. Go to adjustment layer - Solid Color. Pick the color for each layer. We’ll demonstrate the skin color in the video. Change the layer blend mode to Soft Light. Select the mask and hit command+I to convert it black. Now when you paint white color on the mask layer, the color of your solid layer will start showing up. Using the brush tool, just paint on the areas of the corresponding color. To erase any mistakes you can always switch the brush color to black and use it as an eraser.

Make sure you keep all the layers organized and named properly.

This may seem a tedious task but it’s a great way to colorize historic memories!

What photos do you plan on colorizing? Please let us know in comments.

#HowTech #Photoshop