Tweet OK, I'm going to be the bad guy here

There's something wrong with Bebe's left eye in your photo.


Jim

bobfells and mdean,

thanks for your replies. I do see your points.

Hi all, I've enjoyed this topic over the last couple weeks.
"Mastering" Photoshop is no easy task; it takes practice and lots of it. And you can't please everyone, but must first please yourself.
Knowing something about art, light and shadow, and form all comes into play for a successful image. And you need a sharp eye as not to forget to color something, such as a flesh hand (as in gagman's Richard Dix still).
I myself don't shoot for loud and garish colors, usually preferring a more conservative or natural look.
First you must start with a sharp image with good contrast.
Then you should add a transparent wash or tint of color over the entire photo. From there, block in your colors, just like doing a watercolor painting, going light to dark.
And do make sure your monitor is color calibrated.
Here's one of my projects, took an hour or two at most. I added a solid red background to make Ben "POP" which will have a collage of Turpin headshots, and I faded the bottom of the image. It's my initial cover idea which is in the re-design stage. Just wanted to show something from my portfolio since everyone else is! Practice, practice, practice then soar with the eagles and have fun! And don't undertake anything too ridiculous unless the money is good! LOL



Steve R

[Danny Burk]

Paraphrasing Jim's post, there's something wrong with both of Ben's eyes in your photo...

LOL - Yes, they do look a little crossed, ay Danny? - LOL

S

Louie,

With respect, that is your opinion. No one else has complained about the eyes. You are the only one who has said a thing about them. My opinion is you need to adjust your monitor. Because your claim is is strictly the Bunk!

My monitor is adjusted with a Spyder 3 Elite, so it must be an issue on your end.

Yeah, they are kinda bright. (And hey, I have the same monitor calibrator!)

And how do you determine which b/w is blah and which one isn't? Are Edward Earle, Schuyler Crail, Scotty Welbourne, Junius Estep, Frank Bjerring, Eric Carpenter, Robert Coburn, Ed Cronenweth, Ed Estabrook, Roman Freulich, Stax Graves, William Grimes, Ira Hoke, K. A. Rahmn, Mac Julian, Madison Lacy, Gene Kormann, Bet Longworth, Bert Lynch etc. just hack photographers it's okay to colorize because they're just nobodies? And that Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Alexander Kahle, Ernest Bachrach, Eugene Robert Richee, Elmer Fryer, Ray JOnes, Lazlo Willinger are "artists" and can't be touched? I know it's not the latter, because I've seen plenty of their photos colorized. And who is to judge what is "art" and what is not?

I've always seen this kind of digital modification as a contemporary extension of the practice of colourizing posters, postcards etc, that was around in the silent film era (and before). Now people are adapting current technology to this practice. I think it's great. Well, the results aren't always, but it's a pretty neat idea!


There are a few trends that I personally don't like, though:

1. Garishness

Just too bright! It doesn't work for me.


2. Glassy doll-eyes (bonus points for hard-edged lines)

'Nuff said.


3. Terrible makeup

Why the heinous blue eyeshadow? The blush, too! it looks like they did their makeup in 1987. Blindfolded!
I see these kind of 'makeup mistakes' often in recoloured photos. This gets me everytime because of the trends I've listed, this would seem to be the easiest to improve.
I'm assuming the culprits of this are male, because it seems a very simplistic understanding of what makeup looks like (!) and often bears no resemblence to how makeup is actually applied to the (female) face. Women don't block in their eyelids + halfway up to their brows with eyeshadow! Also, when blush is applied it's intended to accentuate the structure of the face - not just be plonked on the cheeks for 'rosiness'.

In this kind of colouration work, awareness of how to digitally 'apply' makeup well can make or break a photo.


But sometimes the results are just stunning:

I'll even give you a pass for the strangely-applied blue makeup.

kaleidoscopeworld,

I disagree that the Colleen-Virginia Lee Corbin photo is to bright. But my monitor is under 40% capacity for brightness and contrast. Try these stils. Do you think that they are to bright as well?

kaleidoscopeworld,

I disagree that the Colleen-Virginia Lee Corbin photo is to bright. But my monitor is under 40% capacity for brightness and contrast. Try these stils. Do you think that they are to bright as well?

My comment was specifically about the photo I quoted - the two you've just posted are more muted to my eyes. (They are rather lovely, but, that blue eyeliner in the first! Are you trolling me, Gagman?) Anyway, in that picture the colours are a bit too saturated for my liking. Not that saturated colour is a bad thing, but sometimes it works better than others.
I admit, though, that pic is not a truly bad offender in the garishness stakes. There's far worse in the rest of this thread, I was just posting in a hurry and also didn't really want to pick on clearly amateur efforts.

Here is one that we might both agree on?

Not bad. But what drink, that would even remotely be likely, would be purple? Is it the juice squeezed from the purple handbag? Also, the skin colors are off. And I don't think the photographer would have allowed such an eye-grabbing color to be right behind the focus of the shot.

Well, I happen to like the Skin tone. As this is from THE BLACKBIRD, they are supposed to be in Foggy London here. Neither is going to have a Suntan. The skin is just about right here. If you give it to much tan or to much yellow pigment, it looks ridiculous. The handbag started out as red or pinkish, not sure how it became purple. The wine didn't start out that way either.

LOL - Yes, they do look a little crossed, ay Danny? - LOL

S

You should correct that- just for laughs

You ask a fair question. I'll answer it this way- b/w is unnatural. We don't see in b/w and much of the history of b/w photography is based on expediency - color was too complex and expensive.

Good point, but we still see and imagine the past we haven't experienced in b/w because that's all that been available. A lot of us still aren't used to considering the past as a world of color, and that affects a lot of our decisions when colorizing photographs. We act like we've been kept in the dark for decades, and now that we've been released into the sunlight, it hurts our eyes. So we convert the blah b/w into blah color, and we're right back where we started. Or we try to color the past with the hues of the present, an equally egregious mistake.

To use another contemporary example, one of my friends inherited a 1924 Chrysler roadster from her father, and it has one of the wildest original paint jobs ever -- light green over ivory. Looks really sporty, but if someone today colorized a picture of a 1924 Chrysler roadster, would they choose those same colors? I'll bet they wouldn't, and that's why I won't stop encouraging all you colorizers out there to DO YOUR HOMEWORK -- study old color images and learn the values.

Bob, you get points from me because you're not only trying to vary the color palette for these old photos, you're also starting to make some historically informed color choices (e.g., the Jolson portrait from MAMMY). I saw your latest post at the Arliss Archives (I'm a subscriber, by the way), and I like the "lobby card" look of the photos you colorized.

But much of b/w photography is utilitarian and not artistic at all. In other words, there's a lot of bla in black and white.

Another point taken, but the irony here is that the "utilitarian" flat-lighted b/w photos are often the poorest choices for colorizing. As Steve R mentioned, you need a sharp picture with good contrast, or otherwise, you're dead in the water.

We see in color so I rather debate why I gave Al Jolson a navy blue sweater instead of beige than leave a very bland looking b/w photo alone.

I went through some magazines from the 1929-30 period from when that picture was probably taken, and found that you could probably get away with a shade of pale blue, pale yellow, or oatmeal for Jolson's sweater. Note that it's a lighter shade than Berlin's sweater, so the first two choices are probably better.

I rather admit that I went overboard in my choice of a color or its intensity. That, my friend, is creativity.

If you really want to split hairs, that's interpretation, not creativity. A playwright creates, an actor interprets. God creates, a painter interprets (OK, I'd better stop there).

My wife Maureen is now my color adviser so hopefully we will see some improvements. Sometimes you can "see" a color but just not be able to make it happen, either it comes out too dark or too bright or you just miss the shade you're trying to get. Last night we worked on some photos from A SUCCESSFUL CALAMITY (1932) and Maureen could "see " that Mary Astor's dress was a powder blue. But try as I did, I kept missing that shade. We settled for a light-medium blue. Ah, the travails of the creative artist - I mean the interpretive artist.

Re: "The Blackbird" photo

Part of the problem of these colorizations is bad taste, but another part seems to be plain ignorance. Those glasses on the table are cocktail glasses, exactly like the ones I get when I order a martini. They would not be filled with wine. And wine does not look like purple kool-aid.

Again, I ask: why color it at all?

It seems to me to have more to do with the colorizer's desire, or in some cases compulsion, to do it, than with the public's desire to see it done.

[Mike Gebert]

They're Aviations with WAY too much creme de violette.

Sometimes the color chosen is definitely wrong. I used to collect postage stamps, so I always check those out. I've seen the wrong color on an identifiable stamp at least twice.

There was also the story I read (don't know if it's true) that when colorizing movies was all the rage, a movie with Frank Sinatra gave "ol' blue eyes" some other color.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned that a lot of these are just kinda sloppy. For the pic with purple martinis, the green suit's rump is still gray. Scrolling up, the door behind the guy pulling the purple-haired woman's dress is two different colors. The one above that has random patches of gray (and eyeliner that dreams of being eye shadow...). The colors don't even try to stay in the lines, something zooming in and working nearer to the pixel level would fix.

And why limit the color palette, which is practically the same for all of these? The colors are going to be wrong, so go to town if you're gonna do it.

And why limit the color palette, which is practically the same for all of these? The colors are going to be wrong, so go to town if you're gonna do it.

This is another thing that peeves me. I have read that the various colorization programs can recognize and render around 59,000 hues, yet most people, even in films, stick to the same basic pallette of aquas, blues, and browns (and I've already said in a previous post what I think about aqua). The 1920s was a time of bold experimenting with color. So why is everybody so scared?

[Mike Gebert]

There was also the story I read (don't know if it's true) that when colorizing movies was all the rage, a movie with Frank Sinatra gave "ol' blue eyes" some other color.

Yes, there was a version of Suddenly with ol' Brown Eyes.

Yes, there was a version of Suddenly with ol' Brown Eyes.

Was "The Giant" stamped in the corner of the screen in huge letters?

Can we wind this particular thread up? It's just become a bash fest.

[Danny Burk]

Can we wind this particular thread up? It's just become a bash fest.

You read my mind. I was about to suggest that it's a good place to wrap this one up. There's really no further info being put forth, just the same ideas rephrased multiple times. It's obvious that some will like it and others won't, so let's agree to disagree and move on.

Humph! Tough crowd here. On another forum I was just told how great this photo is.

Some people might take that as a clue to tailor their presentations to the demographics of each other one's audiences.

Wow. This is just AWFUL.

It has a kind of Monty Python vibe about it.

Could someone be pulling our collective legs?

I tried my hand at some coloring. Here's a still from the 1914 film "Tillie's Punctured Romance". Left to right, Marie Dressler, Mack Swain, Charlie Chaplin, and Mabel Normand:

After I get through hugging every SEAL I know, you are getting such a hearty handshake.

Louie, you *better* get your butt out to Cinecon this year. You won't have to pay for a single drink

Louie, you *better* get your butt out to Cinecon this year. You won't have to pay for a single drink

I don't think it's gonna happen this year, possibly next, it's been a crazy year work wise. But I will get out there and the Sons of Brendel will buy the first round.

[Mike Gebert]

Okay, we're repeating jokes now...