Using the Program

AKVIS Coloriage creates natural-looking colorization in a quick and entertaining manner. Coloriage manipulates colors of an image: from colorizing old black and white photos from your family archive to replacing colors in your color photos. Coloriage can work independently as a standalone program and as a plug-in to a photo editor.

Follow the instructions to colorize a photo with the AKVIS Coloriage:

• Step 1. Open an image.

  - If you work with the standalone version:

  To load an image, you can double-click within the empty window, drag the image into the program workspace, or use . The software supports RAW, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and WEBP file formats.

  - If you work with the plugin:

  Open an image in your graphics editor.

  If the image in Grayscale mode, switch it to RGB. For example, in AliveColors use command: Image -> Mode -> RGB.

  Call the AKVIS Coloriage plug-in from the Filter/Effects menu:

  in AliveColors: Effects -> AKVIS -> Coloriage;
  in Adobe Photoshop: Filter -> AKVIS -> Coloriage;
  in Corel PaintShop Pro: Effects –> Plugins -> AKVIS –> Coloriage;
  in Corel Photo-Paint: Effects -> AKVIS -> Coloriage.

  Hint: A selection made in the graphics editor will be transferred to the plug-in and displayed as the outline made with the Keep Color Pencil .

  
• Step 2. If necessary, you can adjust the brightness and contrast of the image in the Preprocessing tab.
• Step 3. In the Coloring tab, select colors for the object you want to colorize.

  AKVIS Coloriage offers several ways to select colors: in the Color Library, in the Color, Swatches, and Multicolor palettes, in the Select Color standard dialog, or from the Sample Image with the Eyedropper tool .

• Step 4. Mark the image areas using the preprocessing (color selection) tools , , , , in the Before tab. If you do not specify a color for an object, then it will be colorized in the color of the object(s) nearest to it.
  
• Step 5. Press the button to start the coloring process. The colorized image will be shown in the After tab.

  If you want to edit the colorization result (remove some strokes, add new strokes, change the color of the objects), activate the Before tab again and make the necessary corrections. Press the button again.

• Step 6. It is possible to add the result into the Variations section by clicking in the Toolbar. You can switch between the results to compare different versions of colorization.
  To remove a picture from the list, click .

  Note: This feature is only available for the Home Deluxe and Business licenses.

  
  Variations of Colorization

  Hints: Loading a new image into the program removes all pictures in this section. Save your favorite results under new names.

  You can hide Variations in the program Preferences .

• Step 7. In the last stage of work you can manually edit the processed image using the Post-Processing Tools: Recolor Brush , Tuning Brush , and History Brush accessible in the After tab.

  Attention! Use these brushes at the final step! If you re-run processing or switch between the images in Variations, the changes made with the tools will be lost.

• Step 8. You can save the color strokes into a .strokes file by clicking on .
  Later you can load the strokes with .

  In case of some unexpected event (such as a power loss, etc.) the program autosaves the strokes into the coloriage-autosave.strokes file each time when you run processing .

• Step 9. In the standalone version, you can also print your result using .
• Step 10. Save the processed image.

  - If you work with the standalone edition:

  Click to open the Save As dialog box. Enter a name for the file, choose the format (TIFF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, or WEBP) and indicate the target folder.

  - If you work with the plugin:

  Press the button to apply the colorization result to your picture and close the plugin window. The AKVIS Coloriage plugin will close and the colored image will appear in the workspace of the photo editor.

  Call the Save As dialog box using the command File -> Save As, enter a name for the file, choose the format and indicate the target folder.

  
  Result

Coloriage v. 14.0 - Free 10-day Trial