Bringing new life to old photos

So my latest hobby has been colorizing old black and white photos. I am a book cover designer for a university press, and a lot of our books are historic in nature, and we use a lot of old black and white photos on their covers. Well, as you can imagine, after a while, these all kind of start to look a lot alike. While I agree with the argument that some photos just look good in black and white and shouldn't be touched, there are quite a lot that really come to life once colorized. You see a lot more details that may have blended in before. While I do have lots of Photoshop experience, I didn't really have any experience colorizing old photos. So I began to watch a lot of tutorials on YouTube. Some photos require a bit of repair work before you can even begin colorizing — hiding tears, dust, and scratches, etc. This part can be quite tedious and time consuming, but I live for that kind of stuff!

Anyway, I decided a great gift for my mom for Mother's Day would be to find an old photo of her and my grandma and colorize it. So one day, while I was visiting her for a weekend, I flipped through her old childhood photo album and found a really cute photo of her and my grandma. While she was out running errands, I scanned it in and emailed the file to myself to work on once I got back home.

The first thing I noticed was my grandpa in the background watering the new grass with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, lol. While hilarious, I thought it'd distract too much from the main focus, so away he had to go. I also found the garden hose laying on the sidewalk distracting, as well as the string marking off the new grass. Also, in the original photo, my mom's feet had been cropped out, so I researched little girls' shoes of that time period and Photoshopped some on her. Once all that was done, I began the colorizing process. I always remember my grandma wearing a lot of blue and turquoise dresses, so that's the color I chose for her dress. The tedious part of this photo was colorizing all the grass and the trees in the background.

This was the final result:

Needless to say, my mom loved it!

I'm now working on repairing an old photo of my grandpa (my dad's dad) in his army uniform. The original photo was in rough shape, so it's requiring a lot of touch-up work. Not sure if I'll be done in time for Father's Day, but that will be his gift. I will definitely be posting that one on here once it's done!

Thanks for reading, and happy Monday!

—jenerallee78