'Colorization' refers to adding color to vintage photographs to make them fresh and new! It's pretty popular on the internet. There are also many boards on Reddit about colorization (such as /r/colorization, /r/colorizedhistory, or /r/colorizationrequests).

Usually you would use Photoshop or GIMP… but not me. I'm too lazy so I just use paint.net. I've been told not to use it, but my colorizations usually don't gather hatred, so I'll keep using it for now.

Here are some of my works!

Andrew Jackson, face on the $20 bill and 7th President: http://i.imgur.com/29RCPRFh.jpg
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President and honored in the Lincoln Memorial: http://i.imgur.com/TVxwBol.jpg
Mark Twain, famous author from Missouri: http://i.imgur.com/tqiSEA6.jpg

Some more of my colorizations might show up on my Reddit account by the same name, WithOnions.

What I'd like to know, do any of you folks colorize photos? Would anybody like to start? Is anybody interested? Let me know!

Impressive!

That's really cool! Especially Mark Twain, I live within 15 miles of where he once lived! So that's pretty cool for me.

Whilst they're amazing, the first two really creep me out.

I've recently been colorizing some really old family photos. It's fun! (Personally, I use Photoshop, but hey, whatever works.)

Abe Lincoln's eyes seem too blue, but otherwise, pretty cool!

jji7skyline wrote:

Abe Lincoln's eyes seem too blue, but otherwise, pretty cool!

I was just about to say that xD

They're awesome It must be hard to do on WWII films (which they did).

Paint.net is good (I use it almost exclusively)

Don't see why you are told not to use it, with a few plugins it is almost as powerful as GIMP or Photoshop (for most things), and certainly easier to use.

And by the way, nice job on those. Do you have any guides you used, or are you just messing around?

majormax wrote:

Paint.net is good (I use it almost exclusively)

Don't see why you are told not to use it, with a few plugins it is almost as powerful as GIMP or Photoshop (for most things), and certainly easier to use.

And by the way, nice job on those. Do you have any guides you used, or are you just messing around?

I had wanted to do these so I looked up a few tutorials, and one of them offered the option of Paint.net. I downloaded it and used the tutorial to do them, and so far I think I've made around 10. (Some of them aren't online because some are better than others)

And yeah, on my first colorization I uploaded it to Reddit and got a bunch of downvotes and warnings to use Photoshop or Gimp But oddly enough, my later colorizations hardly got any downvotes. I'll keep using it

I like the last one.
Do you have any specific tutorials you recommend?

There's something weird about the first two - maybe the shadows are too hard, making it look more like a painted portrait - but the Mark Twain one is impressive and very convincing. c:

I learned how to do this last summer and had lots and lots of fun
Here's one of my best:

possibly wrote:

I learned how to do this last summer and had lots and lots of fun
Here's one of my best:

This is really good! How did you get all the tones to match up? Did you just do regular fully saturated colours and then use filters to shift them into a similar tone? Or something else?

jji7skyline wrote:

possibly wrote:

I learned how to do this last summer and had lots and lots of fun
Here's one of my best:

This is really good! How did you get all the tones to match up? Did you just do regular fully saturated colours and then use filters to shift them into a similar tone? Or something else?

Yes, basically
I make a layer for each color used and put a mask on it so only what I ‘draw’ on the mask is what shows of that color
After I got it looking decently colored, it looks something like this

Now that looks good, but I thought that I could do better than that
So basically now I just edit it like I would with any other photo and add overlays and adjust some of the curves and levels, I think
Here is the xcf if you wanna take a look

possibly wrote:

jji7skyline wrote:

possibly wrote:

I learned how to do this last summer and had lots and lots of fun
Here's one of my best:

This is really good! How did you get all the tones to match up? Did you just do regular fully saturated colours and then use filters to shift them into a similar tone? Or something else?

Yes, basically
I make a layer for each color used and put a mask on it so only what I ‘draw’ on the mask is what shows of that color
After I got it looking decently colored, it looks something like this

Now that looks good, but I thought that I could do better than that
So basically now I just edit it like I would with any other photo and add overlays and adjust some of the curves and levels, I think
Here is the xcf if you wanna take a look

Wow! Cool use of masks

Thank you
There are lots of basic tutorials online if you're still interested - that's how I learned

abe lincoln kinda freaked me out but he's still good and so are the others

forever
    live
    love
    be cool
    scratch
    end

I would like to start. I have Photoshop CS5.1 and (I didn't know this for a while) GIMP 2.6.

hi