Colorize black and white photos

[bbailey]

Found a link to some software that can colorize a B&W photo. I haven't tried it, but thought someone might find it interesting.

Link with samples: http://www.devlobby.com/forums/showthread.php?p=599

[KeepsakeGirl]

I don't know how anyone is making this work! For one, it freezes up when you click "colorize" on large images. So I sized it WAY down and then used their tutorial to outline my image and all it does it cover the entire image with ONE of the chosen colors...

this is the sample image i was using.. if someone wants to, can you try it and tell me that i'm just nuts cuz i would love to use this app!

[mdurisseau]

I don't know of anything...

[wedeking]

This is pretty cool. Here's the results of a few minute test using your image. This was just a quick bang up job, but with some time and patience I think this could work really well. I'm definately going to play with the software some more when I get home this evening.




Greg

[Ben]

Fun!!!!!!!

[evil4blue]

Here goes. I'm about to get on my Lab color soap box, so beware.

I convert my B&W image to Lab color, then I create a curves layer for each area of the picture I want to colorize. Next, I create a quick mask for each of those curve layers that represent the area I want to colorize. At this point, don't worry about how good the mask is. Then, I edit each curve layer (the a and b curve only) to get the color I want. Once I get a close approximation of the color, I used the paint brush tool to refine the mask for that color. Paint white where the color should show up and black to hide the color. Continue this process until all the masks are defined. Now save a a psd file. Once this process is complete, you can wildly vary the colors in you final images by just tweaking the a and b curves in each layer. Once you're happy, convert back to rgb, and save the jpg, tif, or whatever.

Here's an example.

The masking took about 10 minutes, but the power in this process is that each variation there after take like 30 seconds.