Well, all the fancy tutorials I could find on how to colorize an image take usually hours to apply and also aren’t that much fun. So how do you colorize an image in 20 minutes?

The main problem is the colors themselves. No matter how careful you pick a color in you color picker it WILL look unnatural and wrong. So what’s the solution? Suround your B&W image in your Photoshop workspace with color photographs of pictures that look somewhat like your B&W.

Now comes the fun part.
Take your brush tool, change it’s mode to “color” and it’s opacity to 25%. Select a brush size of 35 for your first go and pick a color from one of your “reference” pictures by holding down “alt” and click in the image.

Now paint the area with your brush that should get that color and you will be amazed how natural it looks (well, I was when I first did that). Repeat, repeat, repeat. Change brush size to 9 to work on details the same way. Repeat, repeat, repeat..

Feel free to adjust the saturation f the whole image as well as the hue to your liking during the whole process.

That’s pretty much it.
Continue to paint until the improvement of the picture doesn’t justifythe time you spend on painting details.