Colorizing black&white photo

You'd have to do it manually. It's not as if b/w photos magically store colour information! I think that someone sufficiently skilled at this would be able to match skin tones quite well, in the same way that a traditional artist can get realistic skin tones with paint.

Do you have a link to the image you're talking about or something like it?

I believe most people use a paint program to work with photographs. The two most popular paint programs are probably PaintShop Pro by Jasc, and Adobe PhotoShop.

Someone may be willing to do some coloring for you if you ask. (:

Quote: Originally posted by tuffy
Someone may be willing to do some coloring for you if you ask. (:

Are you offering Leah? Any help would be much appreciated, but I think I'd like to play around with photoshop a little and see what I can do myself first. Thanks in advance, though.

Quote: Originally posted by Megan
You'd have to do it manually. It's not as if b/w photos magically store colour information! I think that someone sufficiently skilled at this would be able to match skin tones quite well, in the same way that a traditional artist can get realistic skin tones with paint.

Do you have a link to the image you're talking about or something like it?

I'll try and find the images I saw to give you guys an idea of what I'm talking about. It really looked cool.

I know b/w photos don't magically store color and it would need to be done manually, but I thought (more hoped) there was a tool specifically used for colorizing photos. Manually filling in color seems like it would be difficult to get realistic looking contrsts. Like for example, if I wanted to colorize a photo of someone wearing a pair of jeans I woulnd't want to just make the jeans opaque blue. I'd want to show the speckles and contrast you'd see in jeans a color photo. Know what I mean?

I'll look for the images to give you an example.

Try using the "color" layer mode in Photoshop. Then your painting just colours what's there rather than painting over it.

Quote: I know b/w photos don't magically store color and it would need to be done manually, but I thought (more hoped) there was a tool specifically used for colorizing photos.

There's a mode in Adobe Photo Deluxe (Home Edition 3.0) specifically for colouring over black and white photographs. It's under Special Effects/Re-color Photo/Hand Color

It's moderately effective, IMHO.

Sometimes people will take a colored photo, change it to black and white and then layer over a portion of the original colored photo onto the black and white copy. Not hard to do. That gives you the origianl skin tone color on a black and white.