Years ago, I used to take a lot of pictures in Black&White and use photo oils to hand color them. Many of the people who looked at some of the results like the subtle coloring, so different from a straight color photo.
Before coloring, I’d work with the negative, developing it myself, then printing it with an interesting crop, not necessarily a standard size, and once I had the image the way I wanted, I’d setup and start coloring. It took a lot of careful work to get it right, but once done the coloring would add a dimension to the pictures that elevated them above just a color picture.
Having moved into the digital realm, it at first seemed unlikely I’d be doing hand coloring, but digitally it can work even better than before. Case in point, I started with this picture of my grandson:
I shot this while we were waiting for his mother to arrive at the airport. He was proud of taking apart a small, discarded bottle and had to show me how the pump worked. As I experimented with the image, I cropped more tightly and converted it to a pencil sketch:
This gave me a nice texture for the image.
With this as a starting point, I now started working at high resolution on a blank layer with something that was approximately skin color. Each new color was applied to a separate layer and finally collapsed to create a single jpeg:
This isn’t high art, but it’s an interesting starting point for building a more interesting image.
One thing I learned when hand coloring was that the results were always better if I err’d on the side of too little instead of too much. I tend to:
- Color with muted colors
- Apply the color at around 20% transparency
- Color only a limited area, leaving most of the image Black&White
Try it … You’ll like it!