Stuck on grayscale, please please help

[The Nozomi]

I was trying to color the lines on my moms picture. My friend Ashley told me how and I've done it before. I just spent the last four hours coloring this picture for my mothers birthday (today. Awesome). The last FIVE DAYS trying to draw it correctly in the first place. I was a MORON and didn't save it under a different damn file name before trying to fuck with it. It's all grayscale. Even when I put it back to RGB it won't go back to color.
My friend says she thinks a mask is hidden. I don't know what to do. I'm about to just. my god. I'm such a [swear][swear] idiot.

The first one is of my layers. The color in the background was added AFTER. As in five minutes ago. o I can still do color. I just. I can't with the other layers.
Second is just showing I'm on RGB. ._.

Please, can someone help me? I need this done by 4pm tops; it's almost noon now. I'm going to start recoloring the whole thing so... hopefully.

Damnit.

[J Wilson]

Well, since you said "when I put it back to RGB" I assume at some point you converted to greyscale, and then saved it. Sorry but that color information is gone.

One option to get some color back into place though is to either set a layer above everything and set it to color mode and then paint on it. Or take the layers that have the greyscale and hit Control U to get the hue/saturation menu. Check the box that says "colorize" then play with the hue slider.

Just some options.

[The Nozomi]

Nnng. I was afraid someone would say that.

Thank you very much, despite the outcome. You're very kind.

[aitchjay]

Dweller's right. Once you switch to grayscale you discard all color information, so switching back to RGB won't get you anywhere. But since you've already got everything on separate layers putting color back in shouldn't be too difficult:

You basically need a colorized Hue/Saturation adjustment layer for every layer. Click on the half-black half-white circle at the bottom of your layers palette and choose Hue/Saturation. This will make a new adjustment layer, its difference with regular Hue/Saturation (accessible through Ctrl+U) being that it's on a separate layer and thus modifiable at any time. Also, you need to "clip" each adjustment layer to the layer it's supposed to colorize so it affects one layer only. For example, make an adjustment layer on top of the hair layer, check the "colorize" checkbox like Dweller said, and click OK. Then hold Alt and click on the line between the adjustment layer and the hair layer in your layers palette; this'll make a clipping mask, limiting the effect of the adjustment layer to the hair layer only. You need to do this for every layer you wanna colorize, but it really doesn't take much time. If you've got things like the hair, the eyes, the skin, and stuff like that all on their own layers, adding color would take about ten minutes at most.

Good luck!