Photo Restoration Blog

Hand colouring old photos – Skin

I’m sure you have seen photos that have been hand coloured when a photo restoration has been made. They might be the old photos you own or photos you have seen on the net, coloured by “restoration artists”. Old photos were often tinted with inks, this post is about digital colourization or hand colouring using a computer.

Firstly there are many ways to add skin tone and tint photos, this post just describes one of them. Perhaps you have never seen it done this way before but this is good for toning skin and lower resolution images where other techniques may not be appropriate.

We start with a black and white image, its best one with a good tonal range, for the colour to “stick”. Images with hardly any shades of grey are difficult to tone. There needs to be some texture and tone to colour.

Here is a small image showing 3 tones of grey “coloured” (an overlay layer set to colour) with the same shade of skin. Using an overlay layer set to “colour” in the blending mode options dropdown is the basic way to add colour to an image.

How colour modes affect a grey tone

You can see how the colour is denser on the darker shade or grey. The lighter shade of grey  takes on just a touch of colour. If the image you are trying to add colour to, needs to have a darker skin tone but the shades of grey are very light then it will be tricky to achieve this using the “colour” alone.

We can use the below technique to darken the shade. Using the same colour tint as above and

How blending colour modes affect a grey tone

by using different blending modes the colour tone can be darkened to affect the image in different ways. Sometimes when toning an image its not obvious which of these will give the best results, so it’s best to try variations and also to vary the opacity slider on the overlay to alter the affect the overlay mode has on the image. You can see that “linear burn” has the greatest affect here, giving the darkest or most saturated tone.

Let’s try this with a texture and see how it affects a multi tone image.

I have used the same colour tint and changed the blending modes or each overlay layer to show how each mode affects the underlying image. With this knowledge it is possible to use these modes to make the colour “stick” to the image to make a convincing colour tint.

To obtain convincing skin colour tones from the internet just search for “DeviantNep” who gets a credit here for some super swatches and colours for creating skin tones.

In the part 2 colourising or tinting an old photo tutorial ill cover the process of actually tinting the photo.

My last post was bout software and reference and scanners this one is about graphics tablets.

Ive been around long enough to know that a tablet will help you with any design, art, photography or film based application, amateur or professional. I grew up with a mouse, a three button BBC micro computer mouse! It was cream and had 3 red buttons, nice! Ever since then Ive used a mouse. I’m not proud of my stubbornness to change, its just that i’ve been really good with a mouse. A laser mouse on a precise mouse mat with a clever little program I found to smooth your mouse strokes made me as good as anyone with a tablet or so i thought. Yeah fine I could do things everyone else could do but maybe when it came to shading or building up texture it may have taken a little longer.

The mouse falls down where you need to stroke through a brush line, or build up texture or shadow, oh sure you can just set the sensitivity low and build up slowly which is how ive done it for years but its so much nicer with a tablet.

I looked at various reviews of  the Trust Canvas Widescreen, but ruled that one out as it has no drivers for my operating system. I looked at the Hanovan Artmaster III which looked great but there were no real reviews in English and I was loathed to buy a Wacom, after all the world couldn’t all be about Wacom could it. Well thats all that was left in the game at this stage. I understood that some older versions were available on ebay but a bidding frenzy would always ensue and be up at the price range or reconditioned latest versions. I then had the good fortune to find a Intuos 4m on a website with a damaged box but still with warranty. There is no point paying the full price is there.

Image from Wacoms image library

Wacom Intuos4 PTK-640 Medium A5 Graphics Tablet

Well all i can say is wow! Its great, sure it takes a little getting used to but now its like Ive never gone without. If you haven’t got one get one you wont regret it! If you want a full review of this tablet there tons of the out there, this was just a short story of how i came to buy one!

I mainly bought it to help with my restoration and retouching but here is a quick painting i did.

If you wanted to start your own photo restoration business I have listed here some very important tools you will need to the job. These are my top picks for scanners and reference material. Ive added six suggestions here for you.

The software is of course PhotoShop and the latest version is CS5. It a big purchase but then most startup businesses get a small loan to get them off the ground and there nothing better than the best there is. Once you get to know Photoshop you wont turn back. Ive touched on many of the restoration techniques in this blog and all are using Photoshop.

Reference Books: Of course to learn Photoshop you need some reference material so I have added Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book (Classroom in a Book (Adobe)), a great resource for learning the ropes and a handy quick reference guide if you get stuck on something. Once you know how to use Photoshop then you might want to know how to restore photos with Digital Restoration from Start to Finish: How to repair old and damaged photographs a personal favorite of mine and its stuffed with photo restoration secrets and little gems of information that will help any budding restoration artist.

Scanners: You’ll need something to scan those photos too and the two scanners in the above are two of the best of the consumer models and both offer many valuable features to the restoration artist. Both scan negatives and slides and offer great resolution. They will help you scan prints at the correct resolution for restoration.

They will also get you crisp clean scans and not fluffy scans by all in one scanners. Just follow the links in this paragraph to learn more about fluffy scans and good resolution.

TOP TIP! These are my top picks and the must have is the Photoshop reference Classroom in a book!