Colorizing Page

I can provide hard copies of any of these pictures for a nominal fee on glossy paper, A5 size through an agency. My current printer isn't good enough for commercial use. The price depends on what and how, but from around £25.00 per, more if for commercial publication of course.

Added a picture to the New Seekers page. Somewhat given up on the picture below. Someone pointed out that colour values were not consistent on a picture this old, and this might explain why I had huge difficulty making sense of the image.

In answer to a question received this week - no there is no magic program that does all this. Just sheer hard work. There is a product called Black Magic by Neural Tek, and I've played with it. Although you might find it useful for small simple jobs, it does not seem to be suited to large scale complex images, and you lacks the masking tools to match Paintshop pro.

Recently, I've been acquiring some postcards as new out-of-copyright material, street scenes from the turn of the century, from market towns.

I started to colourise photos about three years ago, after I had worked upon JPEG decompression, and seen how images could be split into components.

When you have a colour image, from a photograph, you can consider the image to contain a number of pixels, or dots, which together form the complete picture. Each colour dot can be represented in different ways, for instance, as a combination of Red Green and Blue. A black and white image only contains one such component, so in effect the red green and blue values are equal.

Another way to consider this, which is more useful, is that there is a component of brightness, varying from dark to bright white, while overlayed is a tint value - a chrominance - that changes such a brightness value into any shade. For instance, a light grey section on an image may be red, green, blue, or may even vary chrominance.

Where the brightness of a section on the image is constant, it is quite likely that the chrominance is also constant, but this is not guaranteed. On the other hand, if we've coloured a vase blue, all the shades of blue will correctly apply to all surfaces - and this will, in theory, look as realistic as a colour photo.

So when a black and white picture is captured for the first time, the result is the same as if a colour photograph was taken, and then had the chrominance removed. The colourising job requires us to feed back chrominance selectively, while keeping the brightness the same.

Several important observations about this - if the brightness on a section is a certain value, then some colours are impossible to have been originally there, because the brightness would give lie to that colour.

For instance, if a woman's dress shows up as a light grey, then no way could that dress have been either white or black, because such a colouring would not produce the brightness level that the black and white image records. Although it's more subtle, certain colour combinations simple look wrong.

When applying colour, there are two elements - hue and saturation. Hue gives the overall colour, e.g. blue/red/yellow etc, and saturation gives the intensity of colour. Natural objects, and indeed most objects anyway, only use a low saturation value. Heavy make up on a face, or a brightly coloured piece of clothing may use a higher saturation, but in the main you always make things look more realistic by using a lower saturation - i.e. tend the image towards monochrome.

The process of colourising requires you select small areas that you think are the same colour, apply the new chrominance, and see if it looks right. If it doesn't you simply try more values. You do not destroy the original image by doing this - because you are adding a component that did not exist. At any time, if you were to take the whole image back to monochrome, you would have your original image back once more.

Tinting is the process where, at the time of manufacture, a postcard is manually coloured. Although this is a good thing, when in terms of research we are unsure what colour a building, or person's clothes should be, it does mean that card cannot be colourised. The paint applied removes the detail present in the black and white photo, and it is no longer possible to recover the "realistic" detail that we might achieve by our own method of colourising. You might be fooled from a distance by a tinted postcard, but close up, you will see the images are not any more realistic than a painting would be.

Generally I work at a high level of detail, which makes printing possible. I then reduce the image size for web-page usage.

The first four are photos kindly provided by friends, these are ones with which I am most pleased, and the Henley Regatta image.

	Did these for fun a few years ago, some kind of advertising pictures that were b/w. Click on them for larger versions. Let down a bit by the original quality of the picture source.
	Quite pleased with the silver in the chair, quite a good result, but rather hurried. I couldn't quite work out what was behind the barber.
	Another London scene, quite pleased with the detail in this. Have a large version, suitable for printing if anyone wants it. It is at the East London Docks before the end of the last century.
	A studio b/w picture from the 1930's. Click for a larger image. Like most of these pics, I've a larger detailed version than the one I have uploaded.
	Quite pleased with this group picture, a nightmare to do, took many hours to complete. Click for a 640 wide view, the full detail version I have is considerably more huge.
	You might recognise the boy in the photo as the same as above in the studio. I am particularly pleased with this, click on it for a larger view. (Again, I have a more detailed image not uploaded).
	Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky from a photo taken by Nijinska in 1912.
	Henley Regatta circa 1888. I took a long time on this, colouring dozens of people and objects. I have a very large version of this, suitable for printing on A5. I'm very pleased with this one.
	A wartime photo of a London Railway Station, showing some evacuees. Downloaded from an unknown web site (no contact information)
	A photo of Vaslav Nijinsky in 1911. Hyde Park in London.
	Nijinsky and Maurice Ravel at the piano 1914 from the collection of Boris Kochno.
	This is a relative (unknown), it was the first picture I worked on
	Maria Piltz, dancer from the early Ballet Russe years, she danced in Nijinsky's Sacre de Printemps.
	Queen Victoria and Albert. Not a terribly good job, but it is always harder when I don't have the original high-resolution scan, so just a kind of rough mock up.

Commisions undertaken for colorizing your b/w photo, and restoring torn/marked photos, reasonable rates, contact me (remove red herring) at geoff@geffers.REDHERRINGu-net.com