Black and white picture colorization
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- BaskerviIle0
I'd say that skin tones are by far the hardest to mimic.
I worked by overlaying (or multiplying) colour over the top of the greyscale image, You'll get a pretty flat result like this, so I then built up more translucent layers of colour, highlight, shadow etc over the top.
I tried to find similar images in colour to use as reference, but obviously a feel for what colours you want is important. It's quite fun imaging what colours you think should be in the image. since there is no guides to go from.Then once I'd got most things blocked in, I flattened the whole file and made overall adjustments to the colour, duplicated it on itself and made more adjustments. I also pulled the original b&w image back in at the end and used the original shadows from that to keep the image contrasty, since things had got a bit muddy.
One major tell-tale sign that an image has been colourised, is that the whole image looks very flat, there aren't enough highlights and the colours are typically quite desaturated. Hence going from a good source image will help you mimic colours well
I'd love to try this properly on a highres scan of an old B&W image, something from my family's history or something, so there was a reason to spend time on it.
You've probably seen them before, but some of these are amazing:
http://imgur.com/a/wapUe