A Castle in Scotland: Colorizing an Old Photo

In this tutorial, David Kelly shows how to add color to a photo of a castle in Scotland. The copyright for the original photo is held by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is used with their permission.

David Kelly already shared with us his example of photo colorization - Portrait of William Gladstone. Let's see how the author colorized an old landscape photograph:

 

FOREWORD

Previous photographs colourized using AKVIS Coloriage AI plug-in in conjunction with AliveColors were typical head and shoulder portraits containing few detailed areas, which made colourizing straightforward.

Using photo editor on its own it was possible with selections, layers, and masks, etc., to successfully colourize photographs that contained small, detailed areas. Could using Coloriage AI to colour this type of image produce acceptable results? To find out I used an 1870 sepia-toned photograph of a stately Scottish family home, Crossbasket House.

Original Image Colorized Image

 

THE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH

The original 1870 sepia-toned Crossbasket House photograph is shown below, Image 01.

Crossbasket House - sepia-toned photograph
Image 01. Crossbasket House, 1870. Photo by Thomas Annan
Copyright © University of Strathclyde

 

HOW IT WAS DONE

The steps below explain how AliveColors, in conjunction with AKVIS plug-ins, Noise Buster and Enhancer, was used to convert the original sepia-toned photo into a black and white image suitable for colourizing.

 

THE BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPH

The editing steps 02 to 06 produced the black and white photograph below, Image 02.

after the preliminary processing
Image 02
Colour strokes in AKVIS Coloriage AI
Image 03
coloured version
Image 04

 

THE COMPLETED PHOTOGRAPH

The edited, colourized photo is shown below.

coloured version of the Scottish castle

 

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