InsaneJournal

We are starting off with an image of this suave looking gentleman. Open him, or whatever photo you plan to color-up in Photoshop, then select the lasso tool and increase the feathering to somewhere between 10 and 30 pixels. The larger your image the more feathering you can use, for this size, 20 worked well.

Now, draw a circle around most of the image, avoiding the skin. Why avoid the skin? Well experiment yourself and find out if you want, I'll show you why at the end of the tutorial. But for now, select as much of the image as you can without nicking the skin. A little "marching ants" line will appear. Don't worry about the gaps and soft curves that don't make it to the edges, those are the result of the 'feathering.' Just focus on getting the tie and flower for now. You'll develop your own style and skill for this as you play with the tool more.

You can add to the selection by holding down the Shift key while drawing, you can remove a section by holding down the Alt key while circling. Anyone know the Mac commands for that? I sure don't. XP

Now, follow the path to the tool. Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Your menu may look a little different depending on your version of Photoshop, but it will be there. Three slider bars will pop up, along with a preview tick box. Make sure the preview box is ticked, then start sliding the sliders around and watch the colors change before your eyes! The top slider will change the colors, the middle slider will change the intensity of the color, the bottom slider will adjust the lightness/darkness of the image.

Next off, we're going to edit the hue of a black and white image. This is our new victim, so snag that, or another black and white image and open it up in Photoshop. You know the method now, right? Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Go forth and do it!

Oh ho, but lookie here! I'm a trixy one... no amount of sliding will change the hue of this image! Why? Well there are two reasons. First, go to Image > Mode and make sure it is set to RBG. If it is set to Grayscale or Indexed, Photoshop will not allow the colors to be changed. If you do need to change it to RGB, Photoshop will say it needs to flatten the layers, go ahead and say this is a-okay. So, it's set to RGB, why won't it let us change the hue? Well... this is a black and white image, there are no hues in it. So, we need to add some color to this image. Off to another tool!

Now, there is more than one way to add color to an image, one is to use a method similar to what we did in the Changing Hair Color in Photoshop tutorial, but I'm going to show another method here. Don't worry, it's very simple. We're going to go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance. This will pop up window with three sliders. Pull them different directions and watch the image change colors. The colors you set it at really don't matter at this point, just so long as you add color to the image. Hit "OK" and let's head back to Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation.

Now that we have color added to the image, it's very simple to just slide the sliders until you find a color you like. Yep, it's really that simple. Then you can go back to Color Balance and play with the colors in the highlights and shadows, or even mess with blending layers and add selective colors to certain areas of the image to make it even more interesting, but that, my friends, is for the next tutorial. Hope someone finds this useful!