Freeware to colourize old pics?

[John Latter]

Thankyou everyone - I'll check out the links and stuff in a day or
two!
--

John Latter

Model of an Internal Evolutionary Mechanism:
http://members.aol.com/jorolat/TEM.html

'Where Darwin meets Lamarck?' Discussion Egroup:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evomech

Evolution Research Blog:
http://evomech.blogspot.com/

 

[Craig]

Thankyou everyone - I'll check out the links and stuff in a day or
two!

John;

Do us a favor & let us know how it went. It helps move the conversation
forward.

thx,
-Craig

 

[John Latter]

John;

Do us a favor & let us know how it went. It helps move the conversation
forward.

thx,
-Craig

Sure Craig. It's had to go on the back burner for now though but I
will be coming back to it.
--

John Latter

Model of an Internal Evolutionary Mechanism:
http://members.aol.com/jorolat/TEM.html

'Where Darwin meets Lamarck?' Discussion Egroup:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evomech

Evolution Research Blog:
http://evomech.blogspot.com/

 

[Roger Johansson]

You may want to check out Revelator Grayscale-to-Color
http://users.bigpond.net.au/Revelator/Revelator-Gray-to-Color-Page.htm

Good program, but would need a lot more detailed palettes, with a color
for each gray level a human eye can see. It works only with BMP
pictures, and it has no other features, like selecting areas and
masking areas. We need different palettes for different areas in a
picture. This program can/must be used together with a paint program.

Many paint programs have scripting features which can be used like this
program.

My mother was a professionell colorizer some 50 years ago.
She worked at a photo studio with colorizing photos, mainly portraits.
She used color pens and cotton swabs to add skin color tones and other
colors to black-n-white photos. I have seen some very good examples of
her work.

I think it will be very hard to achieve a good result with any
automated methods.
I would use manual methods, using thin layers of colors, building up to
a good color tone, using the spray brush in a good paint program.

Masking methods can simplify this process, selecting certain areas to
process one after the other.