Beyond Colorize Black and White Photos in Photoshop with Neural Filters

Today I’ll show you how to Colorize Black and White Photos in Photoshop with Neural Filters. We are going to take it further and show other uses for this filter.

Colorize Black and White Photos in Photoshop

The Colorize Neural Filter will take a black and white photo and colorize it. But you can also use this filter to get rid of unwanted color casts and color from photography gels.

How to Colorize Black and White Photos in Photoshop

Before you start off using the colorize neural filter, make sure that your image is in the RGB mode. So come up to the main menu. Go to image mode, RGB color should be checked. Let’s start off with this black and white image here.

I’m going to duplicate the background. I’m going to come up to the main menu and hit filter neural filters and before using the filter for the first time, you’ll need to download it from the cloud. Simply click on the cloud icon to download the filter. So this colorize filter will automatically assign colors to the image using AI. To enable the colorize filter.

Just click on this circle right here next to the filter name. And Photoshop Automatically chooses the colors for your image. And down here you can twirl this arrow right here which says adjustments and you can adjust these sliders to the desired color balance. In this case, maybe I want some more saturation, more green. And Photoshop did a pretty good job even with this reflection here.

So this was a very straightforward image for Photoshop to do colorization. We’re going to go through several examples. Here at the bottom, on the left, you can click on this down here, which says Show Original. There is the before and there’s the after. Your output options. I highly recommend using Smart Filter as your output option and say, OK. So now your image is on a smart object.

You can click over here on the right to reveal the layer effect and you can go back into your neural filter, and double click on it. And if you want to go back and change anything, you’re able to do that.

How to use Focal Point Pins to Colorize your Image

For this example here, I’m going to change it to black and white. I’m going to duplicate my layer and change it to a smart object.

Then I’m going to come up here to image adjustments black and white, and I have a black and white image now. Now I’m going to use my colorize filter. I’m going to come up to filter, neural filters. Highlight colorize and click on this circle. So now we see that the colorize filter missed something. This area over here did not get colorized.

Now we’re going to use some powerful features to help us fill in this color. So over here in our preview window, we have something called focal points. So now I’m going to click in the area where I want the color to change and up comes the color picker. I could choose a green similar to what is there. And I hit OK.

And you see this area right here and the image gets filled in with green. Every time I click in my preview, it’s going to create another pin with that same color. You see in the image where it’s green here again. I can also hold down ALT/Option and click on a pin and it will copy that pin and the color to another location.

And it’s going to keep on using that same color. Every time I click into a different place or when I press alter option and drag to duplicate it. If I want to edit the color on that particular pin, I just select the pin. Come down here which says color, click on the color box. And comes my color picker.

I can change it to make it a little bit lighter, say, OK, now I’ve changed the color on that one pin and I can click on another area in my preview and it’ll color that you see here in the top. And just like the other example, I can change my saturation. Add more green, and here you have the option that is checked.

It’s called Auto Color Image. So if I uncheck it, it takes all the color out of the image that the colorize filter had originally put in and now I can use pins to colorize the image in the places that I want to. So if I click up here, you can see in the image here that this whole area here turned green If at any time I want to get rid of a particular pin, I can highlight the pin and down here click the minus and that will remove it.

That pin is now gone and turn auto color image back on. Here is the before. Here’s the after. If I want to change the color of this brick, you just click on my color picker, maybe I want something like this color. Say OK, and then click in the preview and you see it’s a little bit darker, and keep on clicking on the preview with that color to change it.

So here’s the before and here’s the after. That is a mixture of using the colorize filter with the pins, the focal point pins to either add color where the colorize filter originally missed or change the color of a current location. And now I’m going to output this as a smart filter and say, OK. Here are all my smart filters And I can go back in and change them any time.

How to Get Rid of Color from Photography Gels

So in this example, we have two gels here, teal in orange. And this is a very good image using gels. There’s sometimes there’s an expression of your subject that you really like and when you captured that expression, you kind of wish that you had seen it without the gel just to see what it looked like.

So let’s see what the colorize filter can do. I duplicated my background layer filter, neural filters, select colorize and hit this colorize button. And Photoshop did a pretty good job with the skin tone and getting out the color from the gels. You have all the options here to adjust the color balance, but I can’t see any reason that I would actually touch this photo I think the saturation is good.

There are plenty of reds. In this case, it did a very good job taking out the colors from the gels. So I’m just going to output this one and we’ll go to another example.

How to Get Rid of Strong Color from Photography Gels

There’s the before and there’s the after. In this example, there is heavy gel going on here. So in this case, I suggest Desaturate in the image first.

So I’m going to duplicate my layer up here to image adjustments and desaturate. I might want to make this a little bit brighter. So I’m going to make this a smart object and come up here to image adjustments, grab a levels adjustment and just make it a little bit brighter and say, OK, and this is a smart object and there’s a smart filter.

We just added with the levels. We can go back and change it. So now let’s go into Filter neural filters. Select our colorize filter click on the circle and Photoshop did a pretty good job. You want you can make an adjustment like here, maybe add a little bit more, red a little bit more saturation and let’s use our focal points to do something.

Like click on the background and with my color picker, make it a darker gray there. Say OK, and click again. Making it gray. One more time. Photoshop did a pretty good job of removing the gel colors and giving us an image that looks like it never had a gel before. Now put this to a smart filter. Here’s the before and here’s the after.

How to Remove Color Cast with the Colorize Neural Filter Example 1

So in this example, this looks like it is not a strong gel, and I think we can go right to the colorize filter. Filter neural filters, click on Colorize, click on the circle, and there we go. Maybe take out some of the red. There’s the before and there’s the after. So in this case, you can probably go further with adjusting the color balance here, but that one was pretty straightforward. Again, here’s the before and here the after.

How to Remove Color Cast with the Colorize Neural Filter Example 2

So in this example here, looks like there’s possibly a color grade and or some gels. In the previous example, we decided because it was such a strong colored gel that we would desaturate it first. For this one, we’re going to go for we’re going to use the colorize filter right away. I’ve duplicated my background layer and changed it to a smart object.

I’m going to come up here to filter neural filters, select, colorize hit the circle here and Photoshop changed the color looks a little bit warmer now. Something we have looked at is on these adjustments, twirl this down. There’s something called profile. So we can select any of these other profiles and see how they look. When I first saw this image, it kind of remind me of something retro.

So let’s try retro high contrast. Do you see what that did? And we can try all these different ones. So let’s try retro dark and we can change the profile strength and bring this down a little bit. So it’s not too much until we like it. So that’s another added feature using the profile here. And you can play with these other controls here.

Noise reduction, you can see how that works. Color artifact reduction See if there’s any change there. So that looks pretty good. So that worked out. Now, here is the before, and here is the after. And I’ll put this to a smart filter and say, OK, before and after.

Read the previous blog article here ➡️ How to Export in the NEW Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 Update – Best YouTube Export Settings

See my Photography website here ➡️. https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com