Add Colour to a Black and White Photo - Tutorial 1

In this first tutorial I am going to show you how we can add colour to this black and white photograph of a castle in only a few minutes of work in BlackMagic

For this tutorial only the very basic tools will be used and it can be completed with BlackMagic Home Edition

So fire up BlackMagic - you can download the trial edition from HERE

Load in the castle image, you can download it from HERE

Now select the Magic Touch button - the green hand tool on the top menu, then check the box that says layered, we are going to layer colours

Next right click with the mouse and choose Sky Clear Day [1] then at the top of the image inclick on an area of sky once, you will see a timer that shows the progress as the sky is coloured for you. Now we will add some more tone to the sky by layering, we simply click on the same area of sky again

That was easy !! Now for the castle, using the magic Touch tool again we simply right click and choose the preset Earth Light and then click on the left tower, in the above image i have shown you where with the Letter A but be careful not to click in a dark window area

Ok that’s the castle done but what about the trees? They have also go the light earth colour. Well we could have lowered the integration down but in this case we will not worry too much as we can use the Magic touch tool on the trees. Right click and choose Bush [Greens} Forest and then click on a vary dark area of the trees i have indicated an area in the image above with the letter B, but don’t forget you can use the scroll bars in the image pane to select a better area, in fact we will have to use them to do our final cleaning up.

As you can see we got some green over the castle, we could have allevaited that will use of the integration setting, but for artistic reasons I think Ii like the look of some of it, it gives a mossy weathered look. But lets do some cleaning up any way. Select the Smart paint Brush Tool - That’s the blue paint brush icon at the top- and at the bottom of the screen set thePressure control to -2 (negative 2) this will lessen the effect of the brush.

We can also set our selectivity at the top of the screen to 100, this sets the degree to which the color we paint will take into consideration the existing colours. At a very low selectivity level when you start painting the first pixel below the mouse is taken as the base colour. Blackmagic will then automatically check all the pixels that the mouse passes over and decide wheter or not to apply the paint. you can think of it as a tolerance level. it means we do not have to be that worried that the paint will get applied to the wrong areas

However for fine detail it is still best to lower you brush size and using the auto updating zoom feature

Now right click and choose earth light and carefully paint over the castle, leaving any areas of green you would like to keep as moss

And that’s it !! Not bad for a few minutes work !! You can of course spend more time fine tuning it, adding variation to the trees and the stone work but here if the result using these simple colouring steps Finished Image

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