Colourize the Classics

For Christmas, I received the ultimate gift for a Charlie Chan fan. From MGM, it's the Charlie Chan Chanthology. The DVD set is a collection of six of the Sidney Toler Chan movies. The movies certainly do reflect another time and society. Among other things, the movies are in black and white and there's some background hiss that's captured as the original movies were digitized.

It didn't take long to enjoy the movies. They were about 65 minutes in length and the genius and wit of Chan comes through in every moment.

As I was playing the movies, I felt that it was a real shame that these classics weren't colourized when Ted Turner did his thing. However, with a little bit of photoediting, it's possible to do one frame anyway.

So, I flipped one of the DVDs into my computer and started watching the movie. At an appropriate time , I captured the frame and saved the image to disk. With some editing, the job was done.

Now, if I can do that with that sort of image, how about an old yearbook? Most schools have colour for the graduating class and black and white for the others. I grabbed a yearbook where I was one of "the others" and applied the magic.

The magic comes with a little work with Adobe Photoshop Elements. Scan an image and save it to disk. Open the program and then open the image.

I decided to start with the face first. Using the lasso tool , I drew an enclosed shape around the face inside the hairline. Carefully, you go and try not to include any of the hair, clothing or background..

Unless you're perfect, chances are, you don't get it right to the area where face stops and hair begins. However, Photoshop Elements has the perfect tool to get you there. It's the magic wand . Make sure that you set your tool tolerance to a small value. 5 is a good number to start with. The larger the number, the greater the chance of selecting areas that you don't want.

Holding down the <shift> key, click on the desired area to include between your original area and the hairline. You'll notice that Photoshop Elements expands the original area to include the new area. If you include too much, a quick <ctrl><z> will undo the selection. Take your time and carefully add all of the facial area.

As you can imagine, there are lots of opportunities for mistakes. So, it would be nice to work on a new layer. <ctrl><j> creates a new layer of just the selected area.

Now, to colourize. From the Enhance menu, select Color and then Hue/Saturation. Click the Colorize button and now adjust the sliders to get the effect that you want.

 

This isn't a quick process. But, take your time and select areas to be colourized. You'll want to choose the dark part of the shirt, the light part, the hair, and very carefully the glasses.

Fortunately, I remembered the colours from my old lifeguard shirt!

Slow and easy does it. There does comes a time when you're done! Flatten your image, save it as a JPEG file and you're ready to go.

Now, colourizing old photos may not be high on your list of things to do. It is fun though. How about this...everyone likes a good morph come graduation time. How about colourizing some old photos of parents originally done in black and white?

This could open some doors for some additional possibilities.

 

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