COLORIZATION: VERONICA LAKE

I am posting these two colorizations I made of 1940s starlet Veronica Lake without any commentary on Lake herself. There are loads of great glamour photos of her available online. I don't even remember where I got them but they should not be hard to find with an image search.

I wanted to try a few techniques I've seen other colorists employ, notably by the prolific and talented Jecinci. These are color fringing/chroma noise and colored backlighting. To my eye at least, the former give the work a photographic feel, simulating lens artifacts and color film grain, while the latter adds visual punch.

Veronica Lake colorized with amber backlighting.

For the backlighting I added a layer with the blend mode set to overlay. Then I simply painted over the areas where I thought light should fall. The blend mode does a lot of the work.

There are different ways to simulate color fringing. For these images I separated the colorized photographs into their red, green, and blue components. Then I offset the red and blue channels by one or two pixels in the opposite direction. For example, I shift the red channel left one pixel and I shift the blue channel right by one pixel. Or it can be up or down or diagonal. Different offsets will produce different color fringes.

The drawback to this technique, especially with small images, is you will lose some sharpness.

I assume all the major paint programs can add random pixel noise. Use as much or as little as you prefer.

Veronica Lake with a stuffed black panther. A bit campy.

Both techniques are utilized in each of the images. Like I said, it is subtle yet still noticeable. You're going to be adding color anyway so don't be afraid to step outside the bounds of straight colorizing. Use your imagination!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.