How do you know you’re done? “When all the bits have been filled,” Lloyd says. Beyond that, it’s just a case of experimenting.” “Find the right photograph, follow the technique and you’ll have a pretty good result. “It’s actually a low barrier to entry,” Lloyd says. There are abundant online tutorials to help you to learn how to colourise photos. Experts recommend finding a colour photo featuring similar skin tones to use as a reference. You may have to add subtle layers of pink, orange, yellow or blue. Realistically capturing undertones in skin is especially difficult. Winston Churchill did not wear a purple jacket.”Ĭolorisation is a time-consuming, labour-intensive process. When you do have to guess, Lloyd says, “if it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right. For his historical photos, Jordan Lloyd consults with experts on everything from soft-drink history to Egyptology to pulp fiction from 1920 to 1950. If you want to make educated guesses about the colours the photographer saw through the viewfinder, do some digging. As photographer Martin Evening famously wrote, “Once you have experienced working with a pen, using the mouse is like trying to draw while wearing boxing gloves.” If you’re doing a lot of colorisation, Lloyd recommends using a tablet. Tryforos uses a track pad, as she has throughout her career, which she says works fine if you have a large screen. Save yourself hours by memorising these keyboard shortcuts for the brush and painting tools in Adobe Photoshop.Įvery artist has their preferred style of work. If the photo is sepia-toned, add a Black & White adjustment layer to neutralise the colour and a Levels adjustment layer to fix the contrast. Neutralise the colour and adjust the contrast. If that doesn’t remove all of them, you can always create a layer mask to paint over any remaining flaws.ģ. You can do this easily by making slight adjustments to the Radius and Threshold levels until the little flecks are gone. If you’re working with an old photo, the first thing you should do is clean up the image. Then you can use layer masks to add the right colours to every part of the image. Get in the habit of creating a new layer before you touch your source image, so you always have the original. Whatever your motivation for colourising, the basics are generally the same. “You appreciate the quality of light and dark.” “The elegance of the photo is the simplicity of the colour,” he says. Photographer Kenton Waltz loves colourising black-and-white photos because he can choose which colours to include in an image and which to leave out. “I really like the more painterly, nostalgic look, rather than trying to make it look accurate,” she says. Painting by hand, she worked with a limited colour palette and she still prefers that simplicity. Tina Tryforos, artist and teacher, began hand-colouring photos early in her career before going digital. Contemporary artists still add colour for those reasons. Photos with colour just looked nicer on the mantle. In the 19th century most photographs were monochromatic, so people hand-coloured them, often for purely aesthetic reasons.
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