LoneSky

One of the goals of this project was to carefully colorize the famous photograph by social reformer Jacob Riis, taken circa 1900, so that it would have the appearance of a modern digital camera image. Mulberry St., New York, N.Y. courtesy Library of Congress . How naive I was. The results in this low resolution proof-of-concept, though more convincing than other colorized Mulberry Street examples I've seen, fall far short. The best I can say is that some parts of it look like old Kodachrome film. Mulberry Street colorized by LoneSky. I knew it would be tedious due to the astonishing amount of detail present in the image. I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to give it a convincingly modern look. The problem—one of the many difficulties of colorizing old photographs—is with the characteristic tone response of the original medium. Before 1906, commercial film was sensitive to just shorter wavelength light—blue and green. It even recorded some of the ultraviol...

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 compo...

This is a colorized image I rather quickly made from an old (ca. 1875) photograph of an unknown Chinese-Filipino woman taken by Dutch photographer Francisco Van Camp. "A Mestiza de Sangley" - Francisco Van Camp, ca. 1875 / Colorization by LoneSky.