04-08-2019, 07:02 PM
(04-08-2019, 01:36 PM)Blighty Wrote:(04-08-2019, 01:04 PM)plumbergp Wrote: I have an old primary school class black and white photo which I would like to convert to colour.
Lots of work.
More than one way. Give this method a try:
https://www.tutorialgeek.net/2012/11/use...-from.html
I spent countless hours as a youngster sitting by my grandmother's side watching her hand-tint sepia-toned photos for customers of the portrait studio she and my grandfather owned. I became passably good at this skill myself. A dozen years ago I discovered I could get the same results by spreading digital pigment on a sepia-toned image on-screem. At that point I was using Photoshop, but GIMP works the same way. I began with a black-and-white print as well as a scan of this photo my grandmother tinted:
The hand-tinted picture was dirty and damaged, so I started fresh by scanning the B/W print and repairing the damage, then I colorized the base image to a gentle sepia. (Hand-tinted portraits have warmer, truer tones on a sepia base, and the same seems to be true of digital tinting.) The next step with hand-tinting is to swab on thin layers of oil paint in the desired colors. Mistakes are easily removed while the paint is fresh by wiping with turpentine.
(Pasted photos wouldn't post...)
The digital equivalent is to use a paintbrush in Overlay mode. I made a separate layer for each color. As I recall, I used a combination of selection/bucket fill, a paintbrush for small areas, and erasing for tidying up. As I look at my final result right now, I see that my colors aren't exactly the same as the original tinted photo. That may partly be due to the challenge of getting the color right in overlay mode. That takes trial and error. What you see in the foreground color sample is not what you get on the photo. But also, compared to my memory of them, those clothes were seriously faded in the original and the headscarf too yellow, so I corrected for that.
Were I to start again on this file, I'd deepen the skin tone (I may have left that sepia skin bare), add a tinge more yellow to the scarf, and dab more cyan in the sky. But since I no longer have access to Photoshop to open the file with all the layers intact, it's going to remain as it is.
I can't see a clear advantage in either method, mine or the one in the previous tutorial. Results seem comparable. This does take time, but it can be an absorbing task with rewarding results. Give it a try!