Help Colorizing B&W Photo

mycroft69 · Post by **mycroft69** » Fri Aug 14, 2009 1:47 pm

Greetings. Using PI 11, I'm attempting to colorize an old high school B&W photo I scanned as a 600 dpi image. Using the coloize pen to do the job, I've been quite successful with hair and skin color, but am having problems finding the appropriate color value that will render natural color to the lips. The skin tone values I am using are R=208, G=194, B=185, hex #D0C2B9.

I would appreciate any and all help with finding a solution. Thanks.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Aug 14, 2009 4:11 pm

Different people have different lip colour, skin colour etc.
I do it the easy way - open another photo and "steal" the colour!

mycroft69 · Post by **mycroft69** » Fri Aug 14, 2009 4:32 pm

I tried that but came up with coloring lighter than what I'd taken through the eyedropper. I have no idea why it did that, when capturing the skin color from another image came up with a match. When I attempted to darken the captured lip color, the colorizing still came up much lighter.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sat Aug 15, 2009 10:53 am

Try zooming in before grabbing the existing colour.

mycroft69 · Post by **mycroft69** » Sat Aug 15, 2009 11:31 am

Good morning. Trust the weather is good in Birmingham. Woke up at 5:00 and couldn't get back to sleep, so I was ready when your notification came in.

Did that, and therein may be part of the problem. Most of the sampling images I acquired were no bigger than 150X150. Not providing much surface area. I did finally manage to get a partially-acceptable base color and the test product doesn't look too bad. I'll show you the images for comparison and feedback, but it would likely be best for me to pull them following your comments.

The original:

Here's the color demo:

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Mon Aug 17, 2009 6:54 pm

I think you have done a brilliant job doing this. I would suggest you copy/paste the above post to our Members Samples Forum

mycroft69 · Post by **mycroft69** » Mon Aug 17, 2009 7:20 pm

Thanks for the encouragement and compliment. The original was a wallet photo given to me in June of 1969. I scanned it in @ highest res so I could work pixel by pixel for a real clean image.

I don't think posting them would be a good idea. The woman is still alive and I haven't even gotten her permission to show them to anyone else, but I needed some help getting the colors right.

She's very beautiful. The lady has seen my finished demo and likes it. She claims the colors are all true to the master. I never saw the master photo ever in my life and had no idea what the original colors were in it except for her face & hair.