Adding Color to a B&W Portrait

Aged black and white portrait ©Tricia Lattin

When I first started working on this portrait, I wasn't so sure adding color was going to improve the impact of it. After all, it is lit beautifully, the vignette is subtle but adds to the soft femininity of the photo, and her features are flawless. The only correction it needs is to remove the yellow color degradation caused by time and less-than-perfect storage. On the other hand, this image would have been a perfect candidate to be hand-colored, since it was popular in the early 1900s up to the 1950s to colorize black and white photos of special occasions [1]. This photo is what would now be considered a glamour shot for this young woman's high school graduation and offers a nice range of tonal values, without too many deep values, providing a nice base for the image and color to blend in a complimentary fashion.

Original monochrome photographs were colorized using a variety of media, including thin layers of dyes and watercolor as well as tints [2]. I wanted to color this photo with the same translucency thin dyes and watercolors would provide, but I didn't want a wash of flat color. If you ever saw the black and white version of The Wizard of Oz when they first colorized it, you will know how terribly wrong colorizing can go when there is a wash of flat color over a tonal background...hello Oompa-Loompa.

But before I tackle the coloring, there are a few other not-so-obvious challenges with this photo. These include the texture of the photo paper. It is a very soft, feathery type of paper that produces a texture that needs to be cleaned up in order for the new print to look clean, and there is some mild yellowing caused by time that needs to be removed while leaving a faint sepia tone. Those problems are addressed before any color is even considered, and any defects from the reproduction phase are also cleaned up, such as fine speckles, dust, and scratches. As you can see, there was little in the way of damage to the photo, so this part of the restoration process was quick and straight forward.

Though we say we have blonde or brunette or red or black hair, most actually have a variety of values in our hair, and when the light hits our hair, it brings out variability. Considering this, we don't want a simple wash of brown or yellow applied to the hair, we need a range from brown blondes in the shadows to a white blonde in the highest highlights. Of course, the highs and lows and color ranges are determined by the overall tone of hair as well as ethnicity, but regardless, a nice range of highs and lows is needed for a subtle but appreciable effect. The same tonal variation is true for our skin and lips, and even though we have very dark tones in the shadows of our mouth and lips, and around our nose, they are not a pure black. This is where the time for this particular photo came in...choosing the right tonal ranges and laying on color that blended together and enhanced the area without overpowering it.

Now for the fur coverlet, I wanted to bring in the blue from her eyes into the whites of the fur to give it a more painterly and balanced look. However, I didn't want it to compete with her eyes. Instead, I wanted it so subtle that you hardly noticed it was there. After all, this is an elegant photo of a beautiful young woman, not a snapshot of someone living it up big in a neon boa while she rages the Vegas strip. Applying the color to the fringes of the fur, having it co-mingle with blush of her skin without leaving a sickly blue hue or hard line to the skin was critically important. This took some time, but it was well worth it.

Here's the final result. When I started I wasn't so sure the color could add much to the photo, but in the end, I feel it gave it just enough to make it more dramatic while maintaining its original integrity.

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Colorized and Restored Portrait ©Tricia Lattin

Citations:
[1] Resource: Wikipedia - Hand-Colouring of Photographs
[2] Resource: The Cochineal - Hand-Coloring of 19th Century Photographs