Historic Colorized Pictures

[Kyle422]

All credits go to fellow forum member and friend Luke Young












Here is the facebook page posts his colorized pictures Descriptions for the pictures will come shortly

https://www.facebook.com/YoungsHistoricalColorizations/

[McMuffin]

The colorization process is amazing to watch; I highly encourage people to go on YouTube and watch a timelapse of it. Anyone with photoshop, and experience, can colorize photos.

[will1993]

how do you know what colors to make certain parts of the photo

[A. P. Hill]

Nice Job Mr. Young.

I envy your talent.

[LukeYoung]

Studying each image , and hours of studying Uniforms & Equipment of the period is how i decide on most colors. Certain images have better quality then others , hence making it easier to determinant the color.
(1.) Wool - Wool is the easiest to color and didn't officially go into full swing on till 1863 when the UK was sending uniforms and equipment to the confederacy. The main 3 wools being English Army cloth , Royal blue Kersay , And Imported Types.

(2.) Jean Cloth ???A wool and jean mix??? This was the more common fabric the uniforms was made from , Being able to be sent from home or Foraged from towns and so on. Determining the colors of this is almost a nightmare for some images
so you just go with how light or how dark the shade of grey is. This is more strictly what RBsmith7 said , Strictly the colorizers guess.

Everything else is really self explanatory. It takes lot and lots of time to do one image... trial and error is key , I went from producing crap quality images where nothing looked good..to being one of the best in the US at colorizing images of the American Civil war.
I'll Being posting images here from time to time if y'all wanna see more of my work.

[thomas aagaard]

Ultimately, it is up to the discretion of the colorist. The Army of Northern Virginia was equipped in six-piece Richmond Depot jackets (cotton-wool blend of varying shades of gray and sunbleached butternut with cream onasberg interior), commutation jackets, and store-bought apparel. There is a great deal of debate about the uniformity of the army at any point of the war. I tend to think the Confederate armies were more uniformly jacketed than we see in many reenactments (and War of Rights) but that headwear was less uniform (because a beehive is just better than a kepi).

They also used plenty of light blue uniforms made of wool imported from the UK.

Grant mention in his memories that he in late 1863 had a chat with a blueclad soldier who was on picket duty... when Grant asked what corp he was part of, the soldier replied Longtreet's corp.
The ANV divisions that was send west was issued large numbers of blue uniforms.


This is a very good article (and new) about the richmond depot jackets.
https://www.libertyrifles.org/resear...chmond-jackets

[thomas aagaard]

They imported cloth from the UK trueout the war. But they did not open an officers for this until late 1862.

They mention that this was done from august 1862 and onwards... so rather unlikely that they where common during this campagin.
https://www.libertyrifles.org/resear...-part-1#haines

[Johnny_Reb_1865]

2nd Lt. Atwood Walker 26th Virginia Infantry Regiment Company I.jpg

2nd Lt. Atwood Walker 26th Virginia Infantry Regiment Company I

[MackCW]

I take it we're not talking about new digitizations but rather original coloring?

[Leifr]

I take it we're not talking about new digitizations but rather original coloring?

It appears that this thread is specifically for the application of digital colour to the original plates. Hand-colouring (or tinting) was usually much more subtle and applied to only certain areas of the image. The cheeks, lips and hair were often coloured, alongside physical items such as gold braiding, watch-chains and buttons. Clothing itself was rarely done unless the uniform required something more elaborate, you can probably hazard a guess as to what kind of regiment would desire for their uniforms to be hand coloured (it begins with 'Z'!).