converting B&W photos to Colour

Doublespresso

Is it possible to convert B&W photos into full glorious colour ones?

I know this has been done to some classic movies but I was wandering if there was an easy way to do the same for old photos.

raptorman

I would highly doubt there is an easy way to convert B&W photo's to colour. Even when B&W movies are converted to colour it is a case of skilled artists hand colouring each individual frame.

I could be wrong of course and there could be an easy way to do it but in my opinion it would take ages. Probably have to use something like adobe photoshop.

andy88_2

I think the problem would be in choosing the colours. You could probably have pseudo-colour; areas of coloured monochrome in different brightnesses, but defining thousands of colours would take a while, a bit like colour by numbers drawing multiplied several times over.

I expect Photoshop and other experts could do something stylised, but to make it look real ...

Quonous

It's certainly doable, but it's very time consuming. You can make it look real, but you have to be very experienced with Photoshop. Not to seem immodest, but I'm extremely well versed in the ins and outs of Photoshop, and It would probably take me a good half a day to realistically colourise a photograph of even moderate complexity. That's not an offer to try either :P

GibsonSt19

Quonous wrote:

It's certainly doable, but it's very time consuming. You can make it look real, but you have to be very experienced with Photoshop. Not to seem immodest, but I'm extremely well versed in the ins and outs of Photoshop, and It would probably take me a good half a day to realistically colourise a photograph of even moderate complexity. That's not an offer to try either :P

Agreed.

I colourised one for my mum last year (a picture of her, and her brothers and sisters). It took many hours to do the job properly, but to see the look on my mums face was fantastic.

For me, the 10 or so hours it took to do it, were well worth it.

EvilMonkey

I agree with all the above, but to those who know photoshop well, do you think there might be a plug in out there which has already done the hard work? As someone pointed out a V rough way to do it would be to replace a specific level of grey with a colour. Although fiendishly hard to do as a one off I wonder if anyone did it and saved it as an action or plugin??? (I know, I know this wouldn't work if you have to different colours with the same grey value, a mid green and a mid red for instance)

Might be worth a half hour with google finding out?

skiddy2k

the thing is, if the photograph was taken using a 'Black and white' film reel, than this is going to proove extreamly difficult. the negative where the photo is taken from is only imposed in b&w, so you wont get any colours from this, onli shades of black and white.