Hand colouring with Paint Shop Pro

If you ever feel like you’d quite enjoy adding a personal touch to a photograph then you can with Paint Shop Pro.

There are many ways to do this of course, but one of the more enjoyable methods is to take something like the picture on the side of this kettle and repaint it yourself.

Of course you could do the entire thing if you wanted, but for brevity’s sake I’m only going to paint one panel, you can use the same method for the whole thing if you wanted, but just one panel will suffice as an example.

Step 1 Duplicate the original background layer by right clicking it in the Layers pane and selecting ‘Duplicate’. Rename the new version ‘BW’ since we are going to convert it to greyscale in a moment.

First, however, we want to isolate the kettle so that we only paint that and not the rest of the image, so draw a selection around either the kettle or just one section (depending how much of it you wish to do) using the Freehand Selection tool set to Point by Point mode.

Once you have your area selected, press Control, Shift and ‘I’ to invert your selection followed by delete to clear everything apart from what you want to colour.  If you hide the original background layer to check, you should be presented with something like the screenshot.

Step 2 Now to make the area you want to paint greyscale we need to press Control, Shift and ‘I’ again in order to return our selection to the item rather than its surroundings. T

hen open Adjust>Colour>Hue and Saturation, then bring the Saturation down to zero and click ok. It can also help to increase the contrast a little bit if your image is now lacking definition, so open Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Brightness/Contrast to alter that.

Step 3 To colour it we need 3 layers; one to add colour, one to add shading and one to add highlights. So create these layers within, renaming them accordingly. Each layer requires a different layer mode; for the colour layer we want the mode set to Colour, for the shading we want Multiply and for the highlights we want Soft Light. O

nce you have these three layers set up, order them so highlights are at the top, then shading and colour is on the bottom and we are ready to get painting!

Step 4 Now take the Paintbrush tool (‘B’) and enter the Colours layer. All you are doing here is setting down the tones, you will add shading later, so just concentrate on filling things in the colour you want.

Areas like the mountains here I want to have a blue-grey appearance, but all we are adding here is a pale blue, we’ll add the dark grey in the shading layer.

Change the brush size according to what you are currently painting by holding Alt whilst clicking and dragging the mouse up or down to make sure you can paint accurately.

Step 5 Now that we have the basic colours in place we can begin shading them. Obviously the greyscale showing through gives us some help but we want to reinforce things like the fences in the fields by drawing over them with a dark brown as well as adding darker tones to areas such as the underside of the bridge and the mountains.

Step 6  Finally we have the highlights; we add these by painting with lighter shades in the highlight area, really think about where they should go since the greyscale will have already provided some highlighting and we don’t want to overdo it or the picture will look too bright.

I added a lighter side to the fences, highlighted the bridge, mountains, castle and tree and added lighter areas to the grass. I also used the brush on 0 softness and very low opacity to create lighter areas in the water.

By overlaying different shades and tones you can create an infinite number of effects, so have a play around and see what works for you!