How to Colorize B&W Photos in Photoshop
YOU’LL NEED THIS
PHOTOSHOP CC & A CREATIVE CLOUD
SUBSCRIPTION
A suitable image to edit. Multicore 64bit processor, 2GHz or faster Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909) or later 8GB RAM (16GB recommended) DirectX 12-compatible GPU less than seven years old (4GB RAM recommended)
ONE OF THE BENEFITS of a Creative Cloud subscription is that you get almost constant updates to Adobe’s creative apps. You can also access beta versions of parts of the software, which is exactly what we’re doing here with Photoshop.
The famous photo-editing app has had neural filters, which use machine learning networks to achieve their aims, for a while now, but they’re an incomplete set and some are still in beta. They’re all interesting to some extent, but one in particular jumps out—the ability to restore and colorize old black-and-white photos with a few clicks. Long-time readers may remember that this is something we tackled in Maximum PCback in 2017 but, thankfully, it’s now much easier.
It’s not the only neural filter though. You can do dreadful things with portraits using Smart Portraits, from simply changing the direction of lighting to forcing a face to smile, or become angry, when it’s not. The Makeup Transfer tool can take the makeup applied to one face and slap it on another, which is surely going to lead to an outbreak of online clowns and drag queens, while Super Zoom attempts to increase the resolution of a cropped image. There’s a lot to go through here, so let’s get stuck in.
–IAN EVENDEN
1 FIND THE FILTERS
You don’t need to download the beta version of Photoshop to find these, though you can certainly do that (see panel on page 71) if you want the latest test filters. Just make sure you’ve updated to the latest Windows version of Adobe’s image-editing app (version 2023, which for us is 24.0.0).
>> You’ll find the neural filters, including some marked as beta, under the Filters menu. They open in a sidebar of their own [Image A], allowing you to flick them on and off, although we noticed that sometimes they wouldn’t be selectable from the menu if the app had just started up. However, waiting 10 seconds or so usually cleared the issue.
>> Before you can use the filters, however, you need to download them. Some of them can be rather large, with Photo Restoration coming in at over 800MB. Click the cloud-arrow icon to start the process.