Hand-Coloring Photographs

The hand-coloring of photographs, an anachronism when I was younger, was a tiny niche. And it's probably one to two orders of magnitude tinier now than it was back then. Ctein used to say you could fit all the dye transfer printers in the world into one large living room. Might the same be said of hand-colorists today? Maybe not, but you could fit them all in the same movie theater, I would bet, and they wouldn't come close to filling up a football stadium—even socially distanced. Those are purely guesses. What I'm saying is that I would doubt one Photo-Dawg in a thousand regularly does hand coloring in 2021. Maybe one in ten thousand.

I never liked hand-colored photographs much. Younger-Me/Snarky-Me called it something like "a lot of labor to ruin perfectly good B&W prints with bad color," but that's way too harsh—my particular taste isn't a virtue, and, anyway, Older-Me has far more tolerance for things people think are fun to do. After all, my old "Photo 101 technique" that I thought was so stripped-down and straight-ahead back when it was current is now completely anachronistic itself. It's a niche too, and a very small one as well. Heck, I don't even practice it any more.

In any event, the people I knew who were into hand-coloring enjoyed it first and foremost. Partly or mostly, they did it because it was fun. If you're curious about it, B&H Explora has a nice article by Allan Weitz called "The Basics of Hand-Coloring Black-and-White Prints." He did a subtle job of hand-coloring that great shot of the man with the model boat, didn't he? Although I would have left the details on the walls alone. But let me ask you two questions: 1.) Do you really prefer the hand-colored version to one or other of the B&W versions? and 2.) Might it be six-to-one/half-a-dozen-the-other just to take the picture in digital color and desaturate the colors?

Still a great shot.

Japan
If you like the look of old-timey color, I notice Taschen has just released the third in its 1900 series:

Japan 1900: A Portrait in Color. It's a BAB—big-ass book—but if you're into what it offers it'll be like a wallow in a vat of chocolate. Even if it's not hand-coloring per se, it's got the look.

Mike

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Yonatan Katznelson: "I prefer the warm-toned B&W, but the painted one is nice too. It reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting."

Lothar Adler: "I think Jan Saudek very much deserves to be mentioned in the context of colorized B&W photography, especially since this technique had a very large part in his artistic work, even if his often 'very special' nudes are not to everyone's taste. After all, we are talking about photography and a particular technique, and Jan Saudek used both intensively."

Frank Gorga: "Hand-coloring certainly has a place in the spectrum of this art we call photography. It most definitely provides a unique look in a photograph. Over the past winter, using some pandemic-induced free time, I experimented with hand-coloring inkjet prints using Prismacolor pencils blended with a mixture of turpentine and vegetable oil. The details of the method (including the book from which I learned the technique) and some examples can be found on my website (see: http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4921 and http://gorga.org/blog/?p=4943 ). I have since learned that Marshalls sold (and probably still sells) the materials for this method of hand coloring, as well as their more commonly known oils and dyes."

Bob Johnston [no relation to Ed.  —Ed.]: "The 'colour not having to fill the boundaries' is what made colour broadcast TV possible. There was very little bandwidth available for the chroma information. If you saw just the chroma part of the signal it looked like crude splodges of colour, but put in the luminance and you wouldn't see how bad the colour was."

Mike replies: One example of an exception is something I watch: pool. Check out this '90s TV broadcast. Start this at about 22:30 and look at the warm-colored balls. The orange especially is a "crude splodge." Poor-quality broadcasts can make it almost impossible to know what ball you're looking at.

Comments

[Jim Henry]

I always heard it as "six-of-one/half-a-dozen-of-the-other".

Kind of makes more sense...

[Olybacker]

There's a woman photographer in the USA who has a freezer full of dead birds. She photographs them in black and white and then hand colours the resulting prints. Beautiful work.

I'll probably remember her name in the middle of the night.

[Tex Andrews]

Well, this would depend on what you define as hand-coloring. If you strictly mean "colorizing" a B+W print, the way old B+W movies are colorized (an utter disgrace, but also an argument for another day), then I agree.

But I know that there are thousands of artists and art students doing or dabbling in it to make mixed media works, some subtle and many not.

[William Schneider]

One of the first, and most lucrative, art photo sales that I made was a hand-colored B/W print. I had applied Marshall's oils on a small test print of a landscape and showed it to friends. One of them commissioned me to make a larger version of it. They made an offer that I couldn't refuse.

I don't have a photo of the final version that sold, but I did keep the original test print that led to the sale.

Frankly, I didn't pursue it much afterward. With the gelatin silver printing papers and toners available in the early '80s, there was still room to incorporate color into B/W work to satisfy the itch.

[Moose]

"Japan 1900: A Portrait in Color."

One of the surprises I find in being old(-ish) is the change in time perspective.

When I was in Japan in 1960, 1900 seemed ancient. 1960 is as long ago now as 1900 was then, but doesn't seem so ancient.

It won't be long before WWII is as long ago as the Civil War was when I was a little kid.

Weird!

[Sean]

It wasn’t the added colour that I found most affecting in Peter Jackson’s, They Shall Not Grow Old: It was the added sound. Sound that gave more life to the men in the trenches than colour ever could.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0brzkzx

[Michael Perini]

I've never liked hand colored photographs either. I have a bunch of them, old Family Photographs taken in professional portrait studios mostly from the 1930's & 40's. Many of those studios offered it as an 'up-charge' Perhaps I'/ve never seen 'Good ones. The nice smooth tones of large format negatives and classic lenses were quite lovely when left alone. Although many show almost too much smoothness because of pencil retouching.
I went to New York Institute of Photography in the 1960's. They offered a Commercial Photography Program, a Portrait Photography Program and a Dye Transfer Printing Program. They were located right near New York's Photo district. The Commercial Program was excellent, The Portrait Photography Program was a bit dated, they were still using 8x10 Rembrandt Portrait cameras (tailboard cameras with no front movements -other than the slight down angle of the stand) split backs for 2 5x7" frames on a sheet of 8x10 film. And yes, they taught Marshall's oil coloring. I Got a Job in a commercial studio halfway through the portrait course, so never learned the finer points of 'Hand Coloring"

[Mildred]

Are instructions available for The Basics of Digitally Hand-Coloring Black-and-White Digital Images? (Computer only!) Thought that it might be fun to try colorizing the scans of some monochrome 19th century images.

[Malcolm Leader]

I have all 5 of Ansel Adam's books on techniques and little of it is relevant today, IMO.

[hugh crawford]

I remember back in the late 70s the big thing was to have dye transfer prints made where the printer would hand color the matrices to, for example, turn a purple leather jumpsuit into a yellow leather jumpsuit. Just exactly who was the printer was a closely held secret. A messenger would show up at the art director's office and a couple days later a FedEx package from Boston would show up. "we'll have that guy in Boston fix it" was the equivalent of "we'll fix it in photoshop" Actually the Scitex era was in-between. The difference was that the guy in Boston charged about double the day rate for shooting an album cover so it was reserved for when a reshoot was out of the question not simply expensive.

[Kye Wood]

My wife and I are perfectly matched in all but one area. I love black and white. She hates it.

I guarantee she'd choose hand coloured over black and white, 10 times out of 10.

So... where's this movie theatre full of colourists that I keep hearing about?😊

[Thomas Mc Cann]

Many years ago a friend showed me his hand colouring technique. Basically he soaked small twists of crepe paper in water to give him the colors he wanted

[Mark C]

The LP cover of Ziggy Stardust is a nice example of hand colouring. I like the kind of hand colouring they did in the days before colour prints, i.e. when that was the only way to get a colour photo. I also like the type of slightly unreal colouring that is done in Afghan portrait studios. On the other hand I particularly dislike the typically heavy handed approach that most people seem to take when they use software to colourise photos. There might even be algorithms that do it now.

[Alan Berkson]

Here are some of the modern hand colorists:

http://www.katebreakey.com/small-deaths-birds-flowers-1

and:

http://themesandprojects.com/HandPaintedPhotographs/