Painting Colours in B&W Using Photoshop Elements

Painting in Layers to add colour to a Black & White:

I have opened a colour image and converted it to B/W(Enhance>Convert to Black and White).

To add colour to the black and white image and make the car blue and the driver’s helmet red. Layer>New layer name it colour. Change the layer blending mode to Color in the drop-down menu.

Select the brush tool from the tool box and set the background colour to blue or any other color you wish.

To change the colour of the brush click on the squares at the bottom of the toolbox, the default is black and white. The foreground colour is ontop the background colour underneath. Clicking on the foreground color opens a color picker window.

Using the brush tool paint in the blue colour on the car body, I used a brush size 100px, opacity at 100%.

                          

It doesn’t matter if you go over the edges as the  next step is to use the eraser to rub out those bits.

The final stage with this image was to set up another new layer and repeat the above process to paint the driver’s helmet red.

Final Picture:

Setting Up Adobe Photoshop Elements

I am about to start running an Adobe Photoshop Elements Course at Borders College so decided to post some handouts on the blog.

Setting up Adobe Photoshop Elements so that it gives you best performance:

When you first load an Adobe Photoshop program on your computer it is a good idea to go into the “Editor” screen and set up the Preferences. Once you have done this you will experience the best performance possible from the software on your Computer.



To Set preferences go to Edit (on the top level menu  in Editor) > Preferences is the last
choice in the drop down menu. Select it and choose General in the next drop down menu.
There is a Keyboard shortcut which is “Ctrl+k”

In Performance I suggest using at least 80% of the available RAM and as the program suggests set a scratch disk as a hard disk with a large amount of freespace.