How to Hand-Tint B&W Photos in Photoshop

For its photo-of-the-day earlier this week, the awesome NYPL Digital Gallery featured this black-and-white studio portrait from 1931 of an unnamed young lady who was a dancer in a Broadway revue at the New Amsterdam Theatre. It caught my fancy as a candidate to hand-tint in Photoshop. I’m one of many, I’d imagine, who has a copy of Photoshop on his computer but is only able to harness 5% of its power, but I found hand-tinting isn’t difficult. As the risk of offending the Photoshop experts who read my blog (both of you), here’s the technique I used:

1. Change the photo’s image mode to color (Image->Mode->CYMK Color).
2. For each element of the photo you want to tint, create a new layer (Layer->New->Layer...).
3. Change the new layer’s mode to Color.
4. Select a foreground color.
5. Use the brush tool (and for me, the eraser tool) to paint in the area.

In the end, my layers window looked like this:

Here’s the tinted photo:

That’s it. I also discovered that instead of fiddling with the Color Picker to find an exact color, it was easier for me to choose a general color then decrease the layer’s opacity until it reached an old-fashioned muted hue.