The ability to colorize B&W photos has been around since, oh, I’d guess, Photoshop 1.0. Close to that, anyway. It’s really as simple as making selections of areas you want colorized and changing the RGB values to show color, instead of grayscale.

But it’s not simple, really. Until now.

With Photoshop’s Colorize Neural Filter, you can apply a colorize in a click. Whether it works, or not, is a different issue, but it WILL colorize it…in some way.

There are few controls to modify the colorization within the Filter, but there are some. And even if it’s not perfect, it’s closer than we’ve ever had before, so you accept it, then go back to using old school tools to fine tune your photo.

I’ve tested it on literally hundreds of photos, some digital converted to grayscale and some from B&W film, and the results are impressive.

Oh, and it also works on color images (pretty fun), illustrations, and drawings. Yep. Not just for photos, anymore.

In this Episode we’ll play with:

• Quickly colorizing a photo, illustration, or drawing
• Select areas of the image to change color
• Using the Presets
• Manual color adjustments
• Reducing Noise and Color Artifacts
• Output Options
• Previewing before and after
• and more
  

Even if you never had a desire to colorize a photo before, it’s a nice option to have around.