This is my first try at colorizing

[PhilippeG]

Well, it is all in the title! I have been visiting the RP site pretty regularly in the last few weeks and, as a quite new Photoshop user (since less than a year), I have learned tremendously reading the various threads and tuts. This is really a GREAT site. I am now to the point that I actually produced something on which I would like to get your views and comments , so as to keep on improving my skills.I do this as a hobby but would like to get as "fluent" as I can in photo retouching, it is so fun!. I have scanned a copy of an old photo of my mother in law , have applied curves and some sharpening with Neat Image and started colorizing (as has been already mentionned on this site, it gets addictive) . I am sure I have a lot to improve. Many thanks in advance for your comments and help (well in retrospect as well, since I have already learned a lot here, thanks to you.... Feel free to retouch/modify the files. Cheers.
Philippe

[philbach]

Well you are on the way. It looks to me like your picture has a bluish cast in general. The blue dress has areas that have no color and it looks spotty in places. I worked on the color using Image/adjustments/variations. In general I placed more red in the picture. In addition I removed a few spots.

Thanks for posting this really nice picture.

[PhilippeG]

I agree with the blue cast. Indeed I intended to put some color in the dress for it not to appear greyish but I guess I ovedid the "blue" thing. How did you do to get the dress back with some info in it where it was missing? I was clueless as how to fix this. I like your version with more red overall. Many thanks for your comments.

[philbach]

Well I selected the dress to work on it alone and copied it to a new layer. Then I patched up some spots on the dress. I next used a hsl adjustment layer and used the colorize option. I figured you were doing blue so I selected blue. After that was done it still wasn't right and I used the clone tool and the brush to make things "look Better" if you know what I mean.

[PhilippeG]

I would like to achieve the same results, but now that I have all the layer masks with colors, I am quite lost! Can your method be applied to the layer mask of the "dress" that I have made and then apply the HS on the whole resulting picture. What would be your approach? Thanks for your help.
Philippe