Adding color to black & white imagery

July 12, 2008

Another useful technique for black and white photos is to add a slight tint to it like a sepia tone.  Photo.net has a good tutorial on doing this.  The key idea is to add tints of slightly different colors for more ‘tonality’ to the image as opposed to a tint of a single color.

The feature films Sin City and The Spirit (upcoming) do very interesting things in their use of black & white.  Here is a frame grab from the trailer on Apple’s website (unfortunately the color tints may not show up in the Sin City trailers, even though they are there).  I apologize if the colors are not 100% accurate due to compression and possible Quicktime color management issues.

And with saturation boosted to help visualize all the tones in the image:

Aside from the obvious red tie, there is some subtle color tints added to this image… in particular, the sky has a blue tint added to it and the highlights are just a touch yellow.

Filed under: color correction |