This thread will serve as a space where you can post any recoloring work you've done, along with requesting help with research for accurate colors or confirmation on the contents of a photograph. Naturally, you can also comment on each others work and offer suggestions for adding a more life-like touch to others' photos. If you want to provide a little story behind the photo please feel free to do so, especially if its a major historical figure or someone in your family.
For those who don't colorize, but would like to start, you can do it in Photoshop or Pixlr Editor by creating layers over the original photo and then reducing the opacity so that the color doesn't block out the image, but instead lets the features of an environment or person show through.
Here are a few examples of the work that I've done.
Here's one I did this year and liked how it came it. It's one of the more life-like ones I've done because I realized how much it helps to do different layers on the skin, so as to show red cheeks or Taft's rosacea.
These recolorings were done last year.
I recolored this photo of Radama II, who ruled over pre-colonial Madagascar, and was increasingly interested by the similarities between his clothing and the military uniforms of Second French Empire at the time. Supposedly, he was trying to distance himself from his mother, Queen Ranavalona I (who was known for essentially committing genocide of the other nations on the island and depopulating it by 25%, largely in the name of creating a unified nation-state that could stand up to the UK & France). Whenever I tell this to people, they seem interested that there were African nations who were aware of imperialist threats from Europe and took action to prevent them. Anyway, Radama II was known for trying to approach European nations in a more diplomatic manner, hence the French-inspired uniform. This seems to have been unpopular among the Malagasy upper class and he was eventually assassinated by the kingdom's equivalent of a first minister out of a mixed fear that he was both subverting the sovereignty of the kingdom and threatening the power of the upper class should European forces eventually take control (the assassination did not stop later administrations trying to work with Europe, but it did result in greatly reduced power of the monarchy).
This one is the first photo I ever recolored, from 2012. You can tell I was new to the process because it's really obvious that color has been added. It looks very unnatural.
This is another one of the first few that I did.
This one of Virginia Woolf may be one of my worst. I'm not even sure it's accurate.
I would really love it if anyone else on NS is into this as a hobby or as work. Do you have any long term recoloring projects you've been doing for a few months?
What sort of photos do you try to focus on? I typically try to do people after or before the peak of their fame, to give a bit more of a human aspect to them. Or to get people to see them as a black-&-white image of them in a textbook may not provide. I remember doing a different photo of Albert Camus once and as I colored it more, I realized that Camus was actually smiling in the photo. Something about the black-&-white coloring made that really difficult to see.
