How To Hand Tint A Digital Photo With Photoshop Elements Tutorial

Adding a hand tint to your photos creates amazing results, turning an ordinary photo into a masterpiece. By adding a few tints to a black and white photo you can transform your digital image into something you will want to frame and put where everyone can see .

I always recommend you work with a copy of your photo so your first step is to open the photo in your software program then choose file and save as to give it a new name. I also always tell people to save their work to their desktop so you can easily find it while you are working on it.

In Elements you will want to open up the layers palette then use your mouse and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, thereby creating a new copy of your photo on a different layer; click on "Target" and select this new layer and press SHIFT+ CTRL +U to remove the color from the digital photo. Finally hit CTRL to bring up the "Levels" dialog.

Something to remember is to hit "Auto" to see what your image looks like and then play with it from there. To darken shadows use the Black slider more to the right; to brighten the highlights you can move the White slider to the left; when this is finished you can click OK.

With this layer still selected and in black and white I want you to choose the eraser tool with a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. Keeping in mind that you are trying for a soft, transparent look begin to edit the areas where you would like to see a bit more color. Always remember that you can use the Undo, or Ctrl+Z button at anytime if you accidentally erase something you wanted to keep. 

Now increase your brush size to enhance the areas where you would like more color and finally you can either merge all of the layers or simply flatten and then save your beautifully hand-tinted digital photo.

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