Colorize Old B&W Photo for a Collage

The author of the tutorial is John Bloor.

Original Image Colorized Image

John found the photo of this charming girl when he searched the web for new specimens for his collection of old photos.

a black and white photo of a girl

First, he wanted just to colorize the portrait using the AKVIS Coloriage AI plug-in, but "the appetite comes with eating" and the colorization developed into photo collage creation.

But colorization comes first. He opened the photo of the small girl in the graphics editor and called the AKVIS Coloriage AI plug-in.

In the Classic mode, in the Before tab of the plugin's window, you need to assign colors to every object by drawing outlines within every object of the portrait.

Color Outlines

He pressed the button to start the colorization process.

Colorized Portrait

He pressed the button to apply the result of colorization to the picture and to close the plug-in window.

However, John didn't stop there. He considered the one-color background not impressive enough and decided to use the colorized portrait for photo collage creation. He selected the figure of the girl using the Lasso tool, copied the selection and pasted it into a new image with a black background.

Girl on a Black Background

In the black background, the jagged borders of the photo have become visible. We can touch up the borders with the tools Eraser, Blur Tool and Clone Stamp.

Then, John added some objects copied from other pictures to the foreground.

Adding Objects

In the last stage he pasted a piece of a stained-glass window to the background.

Colorized Photo Collage

 

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