How to Colorize B&W Pictures

Yesterday when we were at the dollar store Emma picked out these cute sunglasses and being the big spender that I am, I indulged her. Ha ha! We came home. Cate napped. Emma didn’t, of course, so we went in the backyard for some playtime.

You’ll see below where I transformed the picture using Gimp. I’ve been having a blast with this.

It took me quite a while to get the hang of it using these instructions HERE. I guess I’m not too great with following directions because it was very frustrating. I kept doing something or other wrong. Now, I could do this in my sleep.

Because I want you all to have as much fun as I do, I am going to summarize that guy’s instructions for you. I think I can explain how to do this easier and in simpler terms. You may or may not agree. Now, I’m dumbing this down a bit just in case you’re like me. I would have LOVED to have had someone explain it to me in layman’s terms when I start fiddling around with this.

1. Open your Gimp program. Go under file to open the picture you want to mess with.
2. Save the picture as something else using the gimp extension “.xcf” (I think this does something to save the layers better than using .jpg or .jpeg extensions. I can’t remember where I read that.)
3. Now hit control D on your keyboard to duplicate the image
4. Go to the duplicate image. Under colors choose desaturate. This will make it black & white. I liked the average setting best. You choose. It doesn’t matter.
5. Now go back to your color image. Hit control L to open up the layers dialog box.
6. At the bottom on the left you will see a little icon that looks like a page. Click that to make a new layer. Name it B&W.
7. Select that layer and then go to your b&w image window.
8. Hit control A to select it all and control C to copy it.
9. Now go back to your color image and hit control V
10. Back to the layers dialog box you want to hit the anchor symbol to anchor the two layers. You will just see the two layers now - the B&W and the color image.
11. Right click on the B&W layer and click Add Layer Mask. You want the one that says White (full opacity).
12. Now go to tools and pick the paintbrush.
13. Zoom your pic to whatever level makes it easiest to color.
14. Select a brush size and color in the area you want to be a color. I find it helps to zoom really big and then zoom out a bit to see how it looks. I’m using a laptop so I just hold down the left click on my mouse thing (sorry I’m not technical and don’t know wtf it’s called) with my left hand and use my right hand to color.
15. When you’re done you need to go to Image and then Flatten Image. Save it and close it. Oh, and you can save it to the .jpg or .jpeg form when you’re done if you like. I’m not sure it matters.

There you go! Hope that made sense. If it didn’t, feel free to ask me in the comments and I’ll answer you.

If you like this kind of look, you should try it. It’s really no harder than coloring with crayons. Well, maybe a little bit harder but not much after you get the hang of this.

Examples:

(Click on any of these images to see them in color.) And of course, there were a couple of more examples yesterday.