Hand-Coloured Pictures

There is an enormous treasure of high quality black-and-white pictures, often in small sizes, just laying around, because we are bored with black-and-white. Colouring by hand is a nice hobby that everyone with Photoshop and a scanner can endulge in. True, it takes a lot of time, but the results can be very fine.

The introduction picture shows a few of the tools used in Photoshop to hand-colour black-and-white pictures. This is how it's done in short: The part of the picture that is to be coloured in one colour, e.g. the sea, is masked off and copied to its own layer. Then black-and-white is turned to colour with Colorize in the Hue dialogue box. The layers are kept as long as possible, because they make post-processng possible.

Hand-coloured pictures somtimes get a dead look from the colours being flat and lifeless. Many times the tones of the picture can help, but Photoshop has an excellent tool: The Gradient Tool. A graduated colour shift gives the picture more life. I used the gradient shown in the introduction picture to shine more sunlight on the sails, give a reddish reflection from the mahogany decks onto the sails, and a blue-green reflection from the sea on the ships' sides, all at the same time.

Sail boat race outside Århus in Denmark in 1947. I didn't take this picture. Instead I found it in my grandfathers old photo album. He was both a keen boat racer and photographer. Knowing the original colours of the boats and the sails it is possible to make quite a realistic recreation of the original situation. I have added more sunshine, a yummier sky, and made everything look happier, although. Isn't that the right of the artist?

Somewhere above Norway, in 1978 it looked like this. Almost. The picture was black and white from the beginning, and has been colourerd by me. It's more like my memory of what it looked like. It was beautiful, anyway.

In thge Swiss alps, above Gstaad I took this black-and-white picture, which I later coloured by hand. The picture shows the moment the mountain railway came out of a tunnel, and the most fantastic landscape stretched out to the right. People photographed so much their cameras overheated.

	Sail boat race outside Århus in Denmark in 1947. I didn't take this picture. Instead I found it in my grandfathers old photo album. He was both a keen boat racer and photographer. Knowing the original colours of the boats and the sails it is possible to make quite a realistic recreation of the original situation. I have added more sunshine, a yummier sky, and made everything look happier, although. Isn't that the right of the artist?
	Somewhere above Norway, in 1978 it looked like this. Almost. The picture was black and white from the beginning, and has been colourerd by me. It's more like my memory of what it looked like. It was beautiful, anyway.
	In thge Swiss alps, above Gstaad I took this black-and-white picture, which I later coloured by hand. The picture shows the moment the mountain railway came out of a tunnel, and the most fantastic landscape stretched out to the right. People photographed so much their cameras overheated.