Photoshop Elements Tutorials - How To Hand Tint A Digital Photo

By David Peters

Beginners Adobe Elements Tutorial

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.

Now the fist thing you need to do for this and any othe photo edit is to open the photo image and save it with a different name, so that you don't lose the original content. One tip would be to always save your image to the desk top so you will always be able to find it at at later date.

The first thing you want to do is open up the layers palette and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, thereby creating a new copy of your photo on a different layer; from here you want to click on "Target" and select this new layer and remove the color from your photo by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+U. Now you want to open up your levels dialog box by either using the windows menu or pressing CTRL+L.

One good tips here is to remember to hit AUTO to see what it looks like and then tweak from there. Use the Black slider more to the right in order to darken the shadows, or you can move the White slider to the left in order to brighten the highlights and Click OK when you have finished.

Now select the the eraser tool, using a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. While bearing in mind that you are trying for a soft, transparent look you can begin to erase the areas on your photograph where you would like to see a bit more color. If you make a mistake, or erase too much, remember that you can use the Undo, or Ctrl+Z button at anytime to get back what you accidentally erased.

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.

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