How to Make Color Pictures from B&W Photographs

How to Make Color Pictures from B&W Photographs

How to Make Color Pictures from B&W Photographs

You know that your digital camera only takes black and white pictures, right? The sensor collects light intensity, and each pixel records a level between 0 and 255. The color information is added in later via clever processing: each pixel has either a red, green or blue filter over it. Thus the camera knows how much of each color is there, even though it records "green" as gray. This is pretty much how technicolor works, although that splits the image into three using prisms, and sends each image through a colored filter to be recorded on a separate reel of B&W film to be combined later.

Tech lesson over. Now the fun starts. You can recreate the technicolor experience with Photojojo's fantastic tutorial. What you do is lock down your camera (a tripod is best) and shoot three black and white images of the same subject using colored filters. This encodes the color information into three B&W JPGs.

Then you head over to Photoshop (or any image editor that will work with color channels) and re-combine the three images into one color photograph. This step is complex, but can be automated. Photojojo's guide makes it easy.

Why do this? Because it's fun. Because you'll learn something about the photographic process, and because you'll get some crazy images. For a variation, try using a colored flash in each photo instead of a filter on the lens. This will give you some very odd background effects.

What are you waiting for? If you have some colored hard-candy wrappers you're good to go. And don't forget, there's a month-long free trial on Photoshop. Off you go!

DIY Photo Magic: How to Turn Black and White Photos into Full Color Images [Photojojo]

See Also:
