by Jim Zuckerman
I will often re-visit techniques that I have used in the past – and sometimes the far distant past, like this one – and I’ll come up a many new images that had been waiting for me to ‘discover’ them. This portrait of my wife was taken a couple of days ago, and I decided to use one of the techniques I teach in my Creative Techniques in Photoshop course – hand coloring. Coloring black and white photos has been around since the 1800s, but digital technology makes is easy to do, easy to correct mistakes, and there’s no need to spend quite a bit of money on expensive sets of paint in tubes.
I took the original shot in my den, using only a single light source. I didn’t feel like setting up a whole studio situation, so I used a household lamp, minus the shade, and a plain wall background. In Photoshop, I converted the color image to black and white with Image > adjustments > hue/saturation by moving the saturation slider all the way to the left. This method of conversion left the image in RGB, even though it looked black and white.
I then used the paint brush tool on about 30% opacity to apply the color for the lips and the eye shadow. The paint brush tool takes color from the foreground color box at the bottom of the tools palette, so I clicked in that box to choose the red color.
With the burn tool, I added some shadows to dramatize my wife’s features. She doesn’t like this portrait because she says I made her face look narrower than it really is. I like it because of the stylized, high contrast look and the severity of the expression.
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