B/W Photo Brightness

[ingyaningya]

I colourise black and white photos, but I also come by b/w pictures where the person's skin is so bright, it is just a white blob with eyes, nose, and a mouth. And when I colour it, it is a super-bright skin colour blob with a nose and mouth.
How can I put back natural looking shadows to it?

[Paul]

Imagination and patience, using standard Photoshop tools.

[ibclare]

Have you tried exposure adjustments and such? If that doesn't work you could try adding a layer, fill with 50% gray, set to overlay and do some burn passes (non-destructive) and see if that helps. However, if the details are not in the photo itself, there will be nothing to restore. Then, as Paul said, it will be up to you to paint and draw in the details. You can do that with soft brushes, starting with low opacities, and use the colors you already have to paint shadow and such. If you have other, better photos of the person, you can use one or more as a guide. Anyway, that's what I would do. Well actually, what I would do is get a better photo to begin with -- if possible.

[joshninny]

ok you want to go to your layer pallet and at the bottom select the fill and adjustment menu
then select levels. adjust the black and grey midtones to get the level of color you want

[ibclare]

That may be, and since it is Photoshop, there are any number of approaches including levels, exposure, curves . . . and in adjusting color balance it can be very helpful to use the histogram and the color channels that are in the levels adjustment palette till the numbers and spikes are more or less equal. But I'll say again, if the detail is not in the photograph itself - if the shadows are under exposed and the brights are blown out by overexposure, there will be nothing to pull out by any method. Oh I can imagine there is some plugin that will find some more detail and build up some pixels, kind of similar to what PS does when enlarging an img beyond original size, but there will be a finite degree of improvement. And I don't even know if such exists