Colourizing a photograph of my great-grandfather
My great-grandfather, Frederick William Johnson, was a nurseryman in Boston Spa in Yorkshire. He was probably in his mid to late 20’s in this photograph, and I roughly estimate that it was taken around 1900:
The photograph was taken in one of the greenhouses at the Boston Spa nursery. The orchid is probably Dendrobium thyrsiflorum, identified from the photograph by someone at the Royal Horticultural Society. The species is native to the Himalayas and northern Indochina. There is a picture of the species in the Sander’s Annual Spring Sale Catalogue of new and rare orchids, which took place in New York in the USA at 11am on Thursday 19 April 1900.
Here’s a colour photograph of that species:
I thought it would be relatively easy to colour the image. I just had a photograph of the original photograph that I had taken on the dining table at my parents. This is it:
First I took it into Photoshop and tidied it up a little, including touching up the slight damage on the right eye, adjusting the levels, reducing the distortion from the bending of the photograph, and removing some of the tint. The modified image looked like this:
I experimented with AI upscaling to improve the details, using recraft.ai. This is one of the upscaled versions:
Whilst I liked the improvements in the details, I didn’t like the slight change in the face. So I made the upscaled version into a layer in photoshop and just painted in where I wanted more details, leaving the original face.
I then took the Photoshop file into Procreate on the iPad and spent about three hours (on my morning commute) painting the colours individually, with the black-and-white layer set to “Multiply” on the top layer. Although this worked for most of the photograph, for the flowers it didn’t work at all, because the center of the flowers in the original are a saturated yellow/orange, whereas the multiple layer is almost black. Just painting the flowers in on a layer below gave something like this:
So I created a separate version of the image and altered the combination of the layers until I got the effect I wanted. Then I made that a layer in the main Procreate image, and painted the flowers back in again. The end result looked like this:
The final image looked good when printed, and I gave a framed version to my father for Christmas:
