Colourised Photographs

Osgood

Western Thunderer
I thought there was a discussion here on this topic but a search yields nothing - so at the risk of deja-vue here are a couple of pictures found today.

BG Swallow detail

1534 L'pool St 1915


They are two of some nice examples scattered amongst the monochromes here:

dpwill44

Not sure why I like the technique so much - perhaps it allows one to add a little imagination to the scene, or is it the contrast?

There is a little more on the technique here - I noticed the name lower left on the B12, it seems the Flickr page belongs to DP Williams of Transport Treasury, and his official website offers sales of prints (I hope it is ok to show these images and promote the website here for educational purposes):

CCM
 
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Osgood

Western Thunderer
Thanks Rob.
I just followed Larry’s lead and found it - a new thread to me, never thought to do a search over there.
 

LarryG

Western Thunderer
Colourised images I did some 17 years ago for publishers were generally rather saturated. The thinking at the time was colour shots on book covers were a must.

The biggest technical problem was the program I used created a lossy image once it was saved even though it was a Tiff. So I had to work with a very large image to begin with, complete the colorization in one session and do all that was necessary in the 'lossy' program before saving it and then opening it up in Photoshop for the remainder of the job. The finished Tiff was always much smaller than it started out.

Freehand control of a mouse while lining out a loco or carriage started to do my eyes and neck in. Loco Insignia had to be increasingly shrunk for it to appear in perspective. I made large scale artwork of the name on the H.R. 4-4-0 and shrank it onto the splasher. If it looked too sharp in relation to the surrounding loco, it had to be blurred slightly. Rather than attempt to colourise grass etc, I took photos of real grass and hedgerows and cut them to suit the scene. Publishers started to use colour transparencies after a few years...

WEB Highland colourise.jpg
Original monochrome print in Peter Tatlow collection.
 

LarryG

Western Thunderer
A British Railway photo of the original LNWR station buildings at Blaenau Ffestiniog on 20th October 1950. After colourising the photo, a sky that would add to the stormy atmosphere of the occasion was dropped behind it. The lighting on the left hand end of the platform was changed to suit. It would make an interesting laser-cut building...

WEB colourised Blaenau.jpg
 
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