How To Colorize A B&W Photo Without Devaluing The Photo's Age

I remember back in the old days when a picture was just a picture. There were no photo filters, photo sharing sites or Photoshop. As a matter of fact, back then you couldn’t even see what your photos were going to look like until you dropped the film off at the drugstore so it could be developed. These days it’s obviously a lot different, and with all the tools available, almost any picture can be altered in any way. About a year ago, Richard wrote an article about some Legendary Black & White Photos Colorized Using Photoshop. Those vintage photographs looked bizarrely interesting with the color infused into them.

It’s easy to use a simple iPhone app to turn any colored photograph into a black and white, but what about the other way around? What about going from black and white to color? That’s not quite as easy. However, with the right tools and this technique, you could create your own colorized photos in no time. The technique taught in the video below will create an effect that is very different from the colorized photographs in Richard’s article which I mentioned. By doing it this way, you will preserve the historical significance and the evident age shown in the original photos.

This tutorial was created by the famous colorizer himself, Mads Madsen (Zuzah). He also created a text version of the tutorial and posted it here on CivilWarTalk. You can also read more about this technique on Reddit where Zuzah answered a lot of questions about it. You might be thinking that by setting the mode to colorize in Photoshop you could get this effect, but remember, the secret here is in preserving the age of the photograph in addition to adding the color. It creates a really neat visual and looks like a unique combination of the past and the present. Very, very cool!