Colorization - First attempt

[bluize56]

I was inspired by a recent video of colorizing old photos and thought I'd take a try at it. Here is my effort. I'm happy with it overall, but the probs for me lie in the windows, and curtains behind it - how to make them look like they belong in the color photo. I've tried layering an ochre colored mask in and then bringing that in ever so slightly with opacity at 20%. But not quite there for me. I may try a bluish cast with the same method. Anyone have experience with some pointers?

Thanks for taking the Time to View,

Ken

[klev]

Re: Colorization - First attempt

This is a reasonable attempt, even if it didn't turn out as well as you might have hoped. This is probably slightly too saturated in places, given the contrast of the original image. As you may have noticed, having one sampled color painted over a region in color mode doesn't look the same as a color image. The balance of each piece would have a lot of subtle variation.

You can achieve better results using different samples to add some dimension to the colored areas, try using an adjustment layer instead, or do both. It's not entirely trivial, so this may take some practice and a bit of experimentation to figure out what works. Painting with a single color for this purpose never leads to striking results on its own.

[bluize56]

Re: Colorization - First attempt

HI,

Thanks Klev for your reply. I had thought about the very thing you mention, perhaps a layer using burn/dodge for clothing, and facial tones. Appreciate your time in answering.

Have a good day,

Ken

[Nezbitten]

Re: Colorization - First attempt

The more you do the more you get to know what works for different images. There is no set formulate. A good starting point for flesh tones and how blending modes can help and affect the tones differently can be found here.

https://www.image-restore.co.uk/blog...-photo-part-1/

Blending modes can bring back to life dull images if used correctly.

I hope this helps