Photo Tinting: the Digital Way in PS

by Christine Gundersen

Photo tinting is fun to do in paper scrapping, but it can take a while, be a little messy and ruin your picture if you aren't careful. Inks are applied to a b/w picture to give a look reminiscent of the old tinted photos. Digital makes it EASY!

1. Choose a photo that you want to use and save as a copy so you don't accidentally ruin your original.

2. In PS(I used PS CS3, for this tutorial), convert your picture to B/W.  Image>Adjustments>Desaturate. You can also change the brightness and/or contrast, as desired.

3. Make a new raster layer.
4. For now, set the opacity of the new layer around 50%.
5. Choose your brush size depending on the size of the area that you are coloring in. I used Normal, Opacity 100% and Flow 100%, but you can play with these options. Also the choice of brush types will result in other looks.
6. Paint over the area that you want tinted, with your desired color. You may mask or extract or just go free hand, whichever you prefer. Remember that paper photo tinting is usually done by hand so it is not perfectly exact. If you prefer the layered ink look, decrease the opacity of the brush and/or change the blending of the brush, before painting in your desired area, this will give the ink build up effect.

7. For each new color that you want to use, create another new raster layer.

8. Once the area(s) are colored in, you can play with the different blending modes and/or the layer opacities to get just the look you want. Don't forget, you can also change the color for any of your painted layers, by using hue/saturation/lightness, for more possibilities.

9. Here is the finished tinted picture.