How to Colorize Black & White Photos with Photoshop AI | Tips

5 years ago

Colourise Black and White Photos with Neural Filters

This short tip uses Photoshop’s Colorize neural filter to bring colour to an old black and white photo almost instantly, and shows how to push the result from acceptable to natural.

Steps

Open the photo and go to Filter > Neural Filters. Turn on Colorize. The image is coloured immediately.
Adjust the colour sliders: raise saturation a little, push red slightly and pull yellow back if it is too strong.
Try the profiles. “Retro high contrast” looked unreal in the video; “Retro light yellow” worked well. Set the profile to None to keep the neutral result.
Click OK. The colour is applied on a new layer above the original.
For better results run the filter a second time on the result. Colours that looked washed out after the first pass become much stronger, and you can raise saturation and adjust yellow again.

Notes

Some areas, such as clothing, may still need a manual touch-up with a brush, but for a few seconds of work the result is very close to a hand-coloured photo.