Photo Tinting: the Digital Way in PSP

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 PSP (I used PSP XI for this tutorial), there is an easy way to convert any picture to B/W. Adjust>Smart Photo Fix..... then slide the saturation slider all the way to the left. You can play with the shadows and highlights sliders and even leave a little saturation for different looks.

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. Suggestions for the other brush options: Hardness 30, Density, Thickness and Opacity all at 100%.
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, 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.