Photoshop Elements Tutorials – How To Hand Tint A Digital Photo
If you want to make your photos fabulous all you need to do is add a bit of hand tinting and you can turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. Whether you want to add a bit of color to a black and white photo, alter colors in your existing colored photo, or even put some black and white into your colored photos you can create masterpieces worthy of an art gallery.
Before you begin working on your photo I recommend you create a copy of it first so your first step is to open the photo in your software program then choose file and save as to give it a new name. Also, to save time, I recommend you save your work to your desktop so you can easily find it when you are finished working on it.
In Elements you will want to open up the layers palette then use your mouse and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, thereby creating a new copy of your photo on a different layer; click on “Target” and select this new layer and press SHIFT+CTRL+U to remove the color from the digital photo. Finally hit CTRL+L to bring up the “Levels” dialog.
I also like to hit “Auto” to see what my image looks like before I begin to play around with it. If you want to darken shadows you can adjust the Black slider more to the right; conversely, to brighten the highlights you can move the White slider to the left; when this is finished you can click OK.
The top showing black and white and with the layer still selected, select the eraser tool with a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. You will now be able to edit the areas where you would like to see a bit more color but bearing in mind that you are aiming at a nice soft and transparent look. If you need to UNDO at any time just hit CTRL+Z.
Finally I want you to increase your brush size to enhance the areas where you would like more color and then you can either merge all of the layers or simply flatten and then save your beautifully hand-tinted digital photo.
