Pixiq

Sometimes you have to try something new because it might just work.

Lately, I have been working on a new project which is giving a new and digital life to my old film negatives. I have a few thousand street photographs and other images that I have produced over the past few decades using my Leica's, Nikon's, and other film cameras. I hate to think of them as no longer valid. I have always loved the grain produced by Tri-X and T-Max 400 film. It represents my history of image making long before I became a digital photographer. The negatives produced with these cameras and these films represent a huge chunk of my life as a photographer.

While hand coloring with a Wacom tablet in Photoshop or a paint program such as Painter or Studio Artist is not new to me, the use of coloring prior to processing in HDR software has added a new and exciting twist to my work.

I got the idea to hand color and HDR my work after I made a few HDR images from straight RGB B/W scans. It dawned on me that the color might be secondary in the process of creating HDR images. I tried coloring and processing as HDR to find out if it would work. I have fallen in love with what is now my latest method of creating art.

In the past few years, I have digitized a large number of my best negatives to be output to inkjet prints. Recently, I began to hand color a number of them using the computer. Using single imaging processing in Photomatix Pro, I tone map them after they are hand colored in Photoshop. It appears that the painted colors are treated the same as if the files were color images. Although in my mind, it seemed that it would work, when I began to experiment, I was not sure what to expect. I have been extremely happy with my results.

There are many ways to create a hand colored look using filters and other software to create a similar effect. I prefer to do it by hand with a good tablet pen as an airbrush. I get much more satisfaction out of using my own skills throughout the entire process.

Basically, I begin to color the images using Photoshop layers. I tend to use a single color per layer depending on the density of the blend required. Sometimes I can easily end up with eight to ten layers. For this reason, most of my coloring is minimal in that I use very few colors. I usually only want to hint at the color of an object. I like to use the simple techniques used by early pastoralists’ like Wallace Nutting and the post card colorists of the early 20th Century. Like them, most of my "painted photographs" rely on a small palette of colors that when airbrushed and blended produce all the color necessary to be convincing as a color photograph.

Once I am happy with the resulting color, I process the images in Photomatix Pro as single image tiff file using the details enhancer to adjust the colors, contrast and saturation settings. While this may not meet the requirements of a multi image HDR, it yields some very interesting and very positive results.  My hand colored images look more vibrant and have a more convincing color photographic result.

Before color film was invented, the only way to create the effect of color was to use dyes, watercolors and brushes. Transparent color was added to the surface of a print, which allowed the black tones to show though as shades. In some cases where a glass plate produced a positive image, the back of the plate received the coloring, which was viewed from the front. The act of coloring a print or a transparency was laborious but could be very beautiful. From near the time of photography's invention until the middle of the 20th century hand coloring has been the dominant method for producing color photographs. Daguerreotype's, Tintype's, dry plates and most other images were often hand colored.

Today, there are many photographers doing Photoshop airbrushing of black and white pictures created from digital imagery. Except for a handful of us, the hand coloring of black and white images from film originals may soon be a lost art.

All Photographs are copyright John Neel 

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