From Chapter Eight:
Working with Scanned Photographs

Creating Special Effects with Photos

 

Adding color to Grayscale photographs

In the days before color photography, portraits and family groups were shot in black-and-white and sometimes printed as sepia-toned prints. These old photos, as well as family snapshots taken through the 1950s, were often colorized by painting directly on the photographic prints with special paints or inks. Hand-tinting added a special, subtle look to old photos, as soft smudges of pink blossomed on cheeks and robin's egg blue appeared-sometimes improbably-in eyes. Some illustrators still use the old-style photo paints to add ethereal color to black-and-white prints and this look can be duplicated electronically to add soft color to scanned photos. The color can be exaggerated to create a special effect that makes an old subject look contemporary.

Tinting by hand

Old black-and-white photographs, such as this 1940 high school graduation portrait of Janet Ashford's mother, Alice Munro, were often hand-tinted with special paints. This look can be duplicated electronically by adding color to a scanned photo in an image-editing program such as Photoshop. In the case of the two photos on this page, it's remarkable to see how much women's dress, hairstyle and demeanor changed over the course of only 40 years.

Adding color to history

We started with a scan of a photo of Janet Ashford's grandmother, Florence Scriven Munro (right) and a cousin, taken around 1900. We adjusted the tonal range in Photoshop, sharpened the image with Unsharp Mask, and converted the grayscale scan to RGB.

Then, to prepare for tinting, we used the lasso tool to select areas of the image that we wanted to color (faces, lips, eyes, hair, bows, dresses and background) and saved each selection in a separate channel. (When the Channels pallete is active and all the selection channels are clicked on, the on-screen image shows all the selected areas defined by differing tints of color.)

We then filled each selection area in turn with a different color, placed in its own layer, and set the layer to Multiply rather than Normal mode so that the color did not change the black tones of the original. We also reduced the opacity of each color layer to levels between 35% and 64%. The result is a subtly colored portrait of two stylish young women preserved from another age.

To create a more dramatic color treatment, we started with the softly tinted version and chose the Equalize command, which turns the darkest pixels in an image to black, the lightest pixels to white and redistributes the midtone pixels between them. This increased the contrast in the photo in a way that made it look paradoxically more old-fashioned and more contemporary.