Colorizing old B&W photos

**Ray1936** · July-07-09, 12:05 PM

A friend steered me to a free download program [[for 10-day trial period) to colorize black and white photographs. It's a bit of fun. The download is at http://akvis.com Once downloaded, it has a help link that is well written. I'm not sure how much the package is to register for good, but the ten day trial for free is worth the effort. I'll prolly register it since I like to fool around with the tons of old family B&W photos I have.

Here's my initial effort, photo c. 1955.

ccbatson · July-07-09, 09:06 PM

Serious photographic artists often go the other direction to great effect.

Blarf · July-07-09, 09:52 PM

Doesn't look bad for a free program, but some of the colors look really funky, epically in the center.

Your best bet would be to have them professionally restored.

**rajdet** · July-07-09, 10:20 PM

They look good Ray, I can see you've been having fun with it.

**Gistok** · July-07-09, 11:11 PM

One of the most difficult b/w picture colorization projects I have ever seen was done to a series of b/w photos of the 4,651 seat San Francisco Fox Theatre, arguably the most palatial movie palace of all time [[sadly pounded to rubble in 1963).

Check out these b/w and colorized pics:

http://www.historigraphics.com/fox/s...llection.shtml

**East Detroit** · July-07-09, 11:19 PM

Ray, that's neat.

Does the software automatically guess the colors, or do you help/initialize it, or do you choose them all yourself?

If the former, any ideas how close to reality those colors ended up?

**Johnlodge** · July-08-09, 08:51 AM

A regular Ted Turner over here. Just stay away from Citizen Kane.

**rb336** · July-08-09, 09:04 AM

â€œKeep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my moviesâ€

- O.W.

**Lferg** · July-08-09, 09:31 AM

Thanks for the tip Ray. Professional restoration is nice, but when your dealing with hundreds of photographs, it's a bit pricey. Have you tried it on faded photographs yet? I have a few pictures from 1917 could really use some help

I just downloaded Ancestral Author. It allows you to try it for free, but you have to register it in order to remove the water marks. It takes your Gedcom file and converts it to PDF.

**Ray1936** · July-08-09, 10:45 AM

Well, in response to the above comments, let me say I like my B&W photos as they are. I'm just fooling around with the coloring to have some computer fun. I actually prefer taking a B&W photo with some damage to Photoshop and repairing it to make it look even better.

On the colorization program, you click on a color you want, then click and drag a line around the area you want filled in. Once done, you click on a complete button and the computer does the rest. You have to use your gut resources to approximate what you think the color actually was. In the sample above, the red chair turned out a bit much, but the rest of the colors would be pretty darn close.

Lferg, I'll have to check in to that Ancestral Author program. Thanks for the tip.

ccbatson · July-08-09, 02:45 PM

The nice thing is, we can have both.

**Gistok** · July-08-09, 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by Ray1936

Well, in response to the above comments, let me say I like my B&W photos as they are.

Aw common Ray.... you know the reason for that comment is because it's especially difficult for you to colorize the dauggerotype plates of when you were a child!

**Ray1936** · July-08-09, 04:59 PM

Originally Posted by Gistok

Aw common Ray.... you know the reason for that comment is because it's especially difficult for you to colorize the dauggerotype plates of when you were a child!

Yeah, they're tough....so are my tintypes.