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What Colour was Your Great-grandmother's Hair? |
What Colour was Your Great-grandmother's Hair?
By Shaun Pearce
I've just made another Photoshop video. This one is about colour tinting
(or "colorizing") an old photo. You may not know this, but back in the
1800's - long before colour photography was invented - people used to
hand-tint black and white photographs with coloured inks or water-colour
paints, and I wanted to achieve that type of effect. Tinting monochrome
prints using Photoshop is considerably less messy!
The photo I decided to use was a recently restored photo of my maternal
great-grandmother (my mother's, mother's, mother). It was taken sometime
in the late 1880's when she was probably in her late teens. It's a
typical Victorian studio portrait: Great-grandma is wearing her best
dress, is standing against a painted background of a garden, and has one
hand resting on a rustic looking chair.
The only thing I knew for certain was that Great-grandma had blue eyes,
every other colour was a conjecture. Her dress was a dark colour, and
after experimenting with a few different colours, I decided that navy
blue looked best. I coloured in the background light green - although it
could have been cyan. The bamboo chair was obviously a bamboo colour.
That just left the colour of her hair to try and figure out.
My maternal grandmother had strawberry-blonde hair in her younger days
(I've seen colour photos of her when she was young) but when I tried to
colour her mother's hair that colour, it just didn't look right. Too
light. Auburn? No, that didn't look right either. I asked my mother, but
she had no idea. Great-grandma was a white-haired old lady by the time
my mother came along.
The only thing I could do was just to play about with the colour sliders
until her hair looked "right". That's when I made a profound discovery:
my great-grandmother's hair was brown - like mine! It was the only
colour that looked natural.
My great-grandmother and I never met, but thanks to Photoshop, I now
have a better idea of what she looked like than would have been possible
just from a black and white photo.
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Shaun Pearce is a writer and video maker.
His latest production, "Photoshop Master", is an interactive video
tutorial. It shows you how to get the most from Photoshop, and can be
downloaded from http://www.learnphotoshopfast.com
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This article is © copyright Shaun Pearce 2008 and may be reproduced in
magazines, eZines, and web pages. There is no charge, provided the
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