Before:


And after I colored it:

Nice one, ek22!

Well done!.
Paintihg with brush each color or colorized it using selections?.

There is another way: using G'mic B&W recolorize, but it's difficult to me.

excellent result!

No I made a layer for each color and colorized it in the hue I wanted, then used layer masks to make the color fit the area it should apply to. There's about 15 layers of colors in that.

I could have sworn someone here did a tut on it a little while back but I couldn't find it again. That's what got me thinking about it.

ek22: whew, fifteen layers of colour sounds like a lot of work! but the result is very good, i think.

You've done that really well EK.

Really excellent job, I'm intrigued how you done the hair as it appears each individual strand from the scalp has been coloured.

Uh well, basically, it's a super-soft paintbrush, in places I used the airbrush tool too. On a masked colorized layer. Like I make a BW layer of the image, then I duplicate it and colorize it in the shade and saturation I want. And then I paint the color in with the help of a layer mask. The key for the hair line was a real subtle touch with a very soft tool.


I was sure someone here did a tutorial on it already, but if no one has, I can maybe see about putting one down when I get my replacement comp.

Using Gmic recolorize

Great job, Akros
It's an amazing filter!

Yeah, I'm impressed with how well it works. Though there are a couple of places where it skips over the details. Like her ring for example. But then I'm a bit of a stickler for perfection.

Using layers

The background I used another image

It has some flaws in the contours, but as I was just focused in coloring, had lazy to retouch it.

EK22 and Akros , really nice work.
EK22 , I think you are referring to the recent discussion on Luminosity masks. In particular there was as reference by Odin to an article by Pat David which was very good. There was also a discussion in MeetTheGimp for doing a duotone which uses soft (not thresholded) masks for colorising a B/W.

nice guys.
I did this one a while back.
For the skintone i used colors -> map -> sample colorize and selected a patch of skin from another colored photo that had dark and light and mid tones of color skin.
i didnt' spend too much time on the hair line you can see where it gets the dark of color skintone instead of hair. I purely wanted to play around with the colors->map->sample colorize.

I did this for a memorial poster, so I tried to make the colors faint but realistic, like an older faded picture.

oops, what?
Tries again…

Where is recolorize found in GMIC? i can't seem to find it

It is under BW black and white

trandoductin I had gone through your blog and read your suggestion. Then follow the links you cited.
That was how I ended up coloring the image (#13)
Thanks for the tips!


wbool63 this is interesting.
I will now search for this technique with duotone.
Thanks for the comment and for the tip!

how did you know i had a blog? have you been stalking me? hehe
So you did use other reference images to use as color then?