How to Use 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 edition (with file in BMP, JPEG, PNG, RAW, or TIFF format):

  The dialog box Select File to Open appears if you double-click on the empty workspace of the program or if you click on the button in the Control Panel. You can also drag the required image into the workspace of the program.

  - If you work with the plugin:

  Open an image in your photo editor by calling the command File -> Open or using the key combination Ctrl+O on Windows, ⌘+O on Mac.

  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:

  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. Select a color for the object you want to colorize.

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

• Step 3. Using the Preprocessing Tools from the Toolbar (in the Before tab), mark the image areas. 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 4. 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 5. It is possible to add the result into the Variations section by clicking on in the Toolbar. You can switch between the results to compare different versions of colorization.
  To remove a picture from the list, click on .

  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 6. 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 7. 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 8. Share your image by clicking on . It opens the list of the services where you can publish the image.

  In the standalone version, you can also print your result using .

• Step 9. Save the processed image.

  - If you work with the standalone edition:

  Click on the button to open the Save As dialog box. Enter a name for the file, choose the format (TIFF, BMP, JPEG or PNG) 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

Want to learn more? As the saying is "a diagram worths many words".

Watch our video on YouTube.

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