please look to see if this is ok

[pjb]

I am doing this for a friend. This is the first time for me in restoring for out side family. Would you all look and tell me if ok, needs help or whatever. Thanks Paula

[Ed_L]

Paula,

Overall, I think you did a good job colorizing it. The one thing that grabs my eye is the highlight on the tree, just right of center. There is a contrast of both brightness and color that seems to draw the eye of the viewer. I think if you could tone this down, it would help.

Ed

[GOLDCOIN]

Hello Pjb......

You are doing a wonderful job, am very impressed with the lovely different shades of greenery... Am sure your friend will be more than pleased....

[DJ Dubovsky]

You're loosing the deep shadow areas of the trees and grass under the trees. In a few cases where color blend mode doesn't allow for the deeper shadows, I've tried multiply and got some good results. Try playing around with your color blend modes a bit on the green layer. Great skin tones. I think she will be thrilled with this.
DJ

[phili1]

PJB. Everything is great, except like DJ said the shadowed area in the trees. try leaving it black uncolored. And the only other thing I might do is use curves to adjust the brightness and contrast alittle, or levels. In real life shadows go blackish and have no color .

[DJ Dubovsky]

OK I played around with it a bit and multiply didn't work well in this situation but darken did. Here's what I did.

I selected all the areas to be green and clicked on new layer to create a new empty layer.

I chose a nice leafy green from the swatches and chose Edit > Fill > Foreground color.

Then in the layers palette I chose Darken blend mode and reduced the opacity to about 45%.

That toned down the color saturation so I clicked on Hue/Satuaration and raised the saturation levels to bring back the color.

As you can see in the top part I only colored the green area just to show you the difference. Since I was doing this quickly I wasn't concerned about my edges so much or the sandy road. In your retouching, you can use a soft brush at a lower opacity to graduate your grass edge into your sand colored road.

Anyway I was trying to show that by using other blend modes you can allow those shadows to show through better. Hope that helps.

Also, I always seperate my colors on different layers so I can easily change them in the future if I should decide. So my green layer would be one and their skin tones another layer etc. It's just alot easier on you.
DJ

[pjb]

DJ
Thank you for going to all this trouble for me. It sure did make a big difference. I will redo and give this a try. I was using the paint brush on color. I pasted this info into my photoshop files.

Thanks to everyone for there suggestions and help.

[DJ Dubovsky]

You're welcome. I was happy to help.

Whether or not you select and fill or use a paint brush to manually color an image, it's all the same. If the selection is fairly easy I will go that route if it's easier to paint with a brush I do that. There's more than one way to do just about every thing.

However, one of the best techniques that will save you headaches in the future is to keep your colors seperated on different layers so you can adjust hue/sat or use layer masks to control a color bleed into another color and even adjust the opacity individually since some colors can be more intense than others. Also, don't be afraid to experiment with various blend modes (besides color) and various opacities. You may find some cool techniques of your own in the process.
DJ