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This is a fun one. If you're into adding come extra flair to your projects, I think colourizing an image is one of the best ways to go about it.
Now, there's several ways you can go about this. When I originally discovered this trick, I was doing it with layers and blending options. But since then, I've discovered much easier ways to got about it.
Part one: Gradient Colours:
1) For this part, you will need the Gradient tool. First, go to your toolbox and get your gradient tool. If you don't see it, right click on the Bucket Fill Tool. All the tools on the toolbox with arrows on them are hiding other tools.
2) Next, pick two colours you would like to use for your gradient. I like to use a sort of hot pink/baby blue mix, but you can use whatever colours you want. There's also a large variety of premade gradients that photoshop provides.
3) Next, go up to the toolbar. There you will see your selected gradient (1). Make sure you've chosen the very first gradient listed if you're wanted the colours you've chosen to be your gradient. Mine appears twice because I use this colour set often, so I made it a preset gradient.
4) Now to make sure your gradient does what it's supposed to. After selected your gradient, go to the gradient settings (2) and pick which one you want. The one I circled is the best choice. Then, Finally, go to the Gradient Blend Mode Options (3) and you'll see a drop down menu. Click on it, and pick 'Colour'. It will be down at the bottom.
5) This next part is simple. Just drag your gradient over the image and it will colour it with the the tones you've chosen. For best results, click on the top left corner and drag to the bottom right corner.
Part two: Colourizing with brushes:
1) Sometimes I like to do this thing where I make the entire image black and white, and then make the eyes blue so that they stand out, or I'll colour the foreground one colour and the background another. Obviously, I can't really use the gradient tool for that. I use the brush tool. First, go grab your brush tool from the toolbox. Once you have it selected, some brush settings will appear in the toolbar, same as the gradient settings. Pick the brush you want, and the change the blend mode from Normal to Colour.
2) First, I'm going to make the image all greyscale. The easiest way to do it is to select a large brush and paint over the image with either black or white while the brush is still set to colour. You COULD just go Image>>Mode>>Greyscale, but then you'd have to switch it back to RGB afterwards. This way is much easier.
3) Now that I've done that, I can do the eyes. Since the image was still too dark to do this without looking weird, I upped the brightness and contrast a little.
4) Now her eyes look sorta weird, all bright orange like that (C'mon, it's Lina Inverse, I couldn't use the blue!) So I'm going to go grab my burn tool and fix them up a little. Underneath where the gradient tool is, you'll find the burn tool. If you see something that looks like a magnifying glass only black, you're looking at the Dodge tool. Right Click on it, and select the Burning tool. Make sure your Burn brush size isn't too large, or it'll darken areas it shouldn't and it will look weird. The more you rub with it, the darker it will get.
5) Once you're done with that, you may or may not like how the coloured area stands out against the rest of the image. Grab your normal brush again, change it back to black or white, and go up to the toolbar. Right next to the blending mode, you should see the Opacity Menu. Change it from 100% to like, 50% and then paint over your coloured area. Note: I then used the Dodge tool to highlight a few shiny areas.
6) After I coloured all the little areas I wanted, I used the gradient colouring to made the rest of the base, well, not suck. I changed the Gradient Opacity to 50% so that it wouldn't erase all the work I have just done.
