Wednesday, January 25, 2006

b&w to color

Found this really cool app, recolored - it let's you take black & white photos and change them to color with a small amount of input - you specify which gray areas should take which color and it handles it all, including highlights and specular spots

It is available for download here

The series of the pics on the main page are pretty straightforward. I managed to "colorize" a Marilyn Monroe pic, it turned OK, not too bad - I guess you need a fair amount of practice and some knowledge of photograph colors will be of help

Unfortunately, the intermediary picture which generated the colored one was lost, much as I hate to post incomplete works - Murphy was definitely around today...

Some tips, keep this in mind while working, also do look at this very useful tutorial

a. thickness of the stroke does not matter
b. start with marking out main areas, like clothes and background
c. follow up by fixing areas where color bleeds in
d. test out color dropper, pen, eraser & color replacer, all 4 tools - to change hue, dbl-click color swatch

Another attempt, notice the color bleed around the knees, this can be fixed by putting the correct color stroke where the bleed occured

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the bW photo is much more beautiful