Beginner’s Guide to Colorizing Old Photographs in Adobe Photoshop

Bring old black & white photos to life through color: learn how to take advantage of Adobe Photoshop’s Colorize Neural Filter to get started with colorizing & complete the look with manual final touches!

Restoring an old image and bringing it back to its former glory is a unique and special experience, and a process which it is easy to lose yourself in as you spend countless hours delving through old family albums and lovingly removing the dust and scratches which aged photos picked up over time. And as part of the process, colorizing black and white photographs is a great way to bring new life to old pictures which need restoring.

In this 40 minute course, you will learn:

• tips and best practices for capturing your photographs for effective restoration and colorization;
• how to prepare your old digitised photographs or digital black and white photographs for colorization by setting the correct Color Mode, cropping and resizing;
• how to get the most out of using the Colorize Neural Filter’s settings to create your desired look;
• how to output the filter’s results for a non-destructive colorization workflow;
• how to edit and finalize the look of your colorized photographs manually using the Brush and Eyedropper tools to get the best possible results.

This course is beginner-friendly and is designed for everyone who is interested in colorizing old black and white photographs. So whether, like me, you have some family photographs you want to restore and colorize to surprise your family members with, or someone who is excited about working with AI and wants to get some tips for getting started with Adobe Photoshop’s Neural Filters, or a student, photographer or editor who wants to add a new technique to your creative toolkit — this course is for you!

— Dominic / Attitude Creative

Required Software:

To follow along with the course you will need the latest Creative Cloud version of Adobe Photoshop (2023 release or newer).

Related Course:

In this course, we will focus solely on the image colorization process and related techniques. If you would like to learn how to restore your old photographs, don’t hesitate to check out my other courseBeginner’s Guide to Retouching Old Photographs in Adobe Photoshop to learn how to get the most out of Adobe Photoshop’s various retouching tools.

FAQs

Do I need any previous skills or experience to take this course?

This course is designed for beginners, who do not have any prior experience of colorizing photographs and/or using Adobe Photoshop's Colorize Neural Filter, but having some prior experience working with Adobe Photoshop can make the learning process even more enjoyable!

Will you be covering retouching tools in this course?

No, in this course, we will focus solely on the image colorization process and related techniques. If you want to learn about restoring old photographs and how to get the most out of Adobe Photoshop’s various retouching tools, don’t hesitate to check out my course Beginner’s Guide to Retouching Old Photographs in Adobe Photoshop.

Is this course just about using Adobe Photoshop's Colorize Neural Filter?

In this course, we will be using the Colorize Neural Filter to create the initial colorized look of your photographs, before finalizing the coloring manually in Adobe Photoshop using brushes. Apart from learning how to get the most out of the Colorize Neural Filter, in this course you will learn how to best capture and prepare your photographs for colorization, how to colorize your images non-destructively and ultimately how to get the best possible results when colorizing your photographs.

Why do I need this course, can’t I just use some app to colorize my photographs and not bother with Photoshop?

This class is designed for people who care about how their colorized photographs look, and who want to be able to make adjustments and create the best possible results which can be used in print. At the moment, automatic colorization and AI don’t create perfect results and often produce patchy and blotchy coloring — which is maybe okay if you are getting started, but if you want to have properly colored photographs, this course covers that process.