Board index Photography Artistic Questions How to make 20's pictures?

Artistic Questions

How to make 20's pictures?

Discuss style and artistic aspects of photography
amve
 
Posts: 23

How to make 20's pictures?

Post Sun Feb 24, 2008 1:04 am


I would love to make my pictures to look like something like this:

http://www.hairarchives.com/private/victorian1new.htm

I have tried to use grayscale and then history brush tool in Photoshop but the colours comes out too sharp (in my opinion).

What do I need to do (if it's possible)? I guess back in the 20's they had a different technique.

ernst
 
Posts: 537
Location: Maastricht, Netherlands


Post Sun Feb 24, 2008 10:20 am


Back then they hand coloured the BW prints. Perhaps you should try that too. Instead of using hustory brush, try painting with new colours...

halesr
 
Posts: 664


Post Sun Feb 24, 2008 12:21 pm


I think you are on the right track. I think you can find a tutorial by googling handcoloring black and white images. This is one way to do it.

Do the conversion to b&w that you like and there are about 6 different ways to do it. These images mostly look sepia to me so you may want to go toward a sepia tone.

For the coloring:
1. Add a new layer. Set the mode to COLOR. Select one color and lower the opacity of your brush. Paint over the areas you want to color. You can then add a slight gaussian blur to the layer.

2. For each color add a new layer to paint on.

It also looks like soft focus. So, I would dry a glow or soft focus action or whatever you use. Here is where I am not sure, whether you should do this before or after you do your coloring. I would try it both ways.

Here is a link where they did an infrared action and colored in just the rose.

http://www.ppmag.com/web-exclusives/2006/11/tutorial-digital-infrared-and.html

Here is a link to a tutorial on the handcoloring.

http://www.dpandi.com/howtos/handcolor/

Another link that might be useful

http://www.shuttertalk.com/articles/handcolouring

Hope this helps you get started.

Rene

amve
 
Posts: 23


Post Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:22 pm


Thank you Ernst and Rene. I'm alreday practising.

marxz
 
Posts: 282


Post Fri Feb 29, 2008 6:38 am


My mother used to do this and as such I grew up with a house full of hand tinted B&W images...... when I experimented with this in photoshop I found the best and easiest technique is quite easy.


Assuming using Photoshop

create a saturation/hue adjustment layer and desaturate all colours down to the level you want for the colour/colours you want to leave in.

create a channel mixer adjustment layer, select "monochrome" check box and adjust the channel mix (you'll probably still want it predominantly red but mix in blue or green in (they affect the brightness so if you increase the blue or green you'll either need to pull down the red or use the master slider to decrease overall brightness).

using the layer mask on the channel mixer layer select a large soft brush at about 3% to 6 %, select black and paint a "hole" in the layer mask to allow colour to show through.... if you overdo it you change back to white for the brush and paint back over the area.

one thing I also do _sometimes_ is to duplicate the image layer, put it to "soft light" blending at about 25%-50% then run "displacement glow" filter with a high amount of noise on it to great the soft glow and add noise to an otherwise clean digital image.

In lightroom the process is even easier (assuming the colour you want to "hand tint effect" exists only in the area you want it to show up in the final image as Lightroom has no masking ability).
drop down to the HSL (Hue Saturation Luminosity) area of the develop window and pull down the saturation sliders to 0 (or there about) for all the colours you want removed and adjust the slider for the ones you want to keep up or down to get the level of saturation you want.
You can also use the luminosity to change luminosity of colour areas (even after they are desaturated) so to be able change to the emphasis/impact of certain areas.

these days I'm mostly using this technique to create extra emphasis in one are / deemphasise another area rather than creating hand tinted style images but the technique is much the same just now I usually leave things fairly saturated (or don't use the saturation/hue layer at all).

http://www.pbase.com/marxz/image/89015606/medium.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/marxz/image/93356576/medium.jpg


These two below have displacement glow applied:


http://www.pbase.com/marxz/image/86338078

http://www.pbase.com/marxz/image/90489211/medium.jpg
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