This one is directed towards those of you who are into photo restoration or colorization. I've been playing with coloring a childhood photo of my girlfriend's mother. I'm basically happy with the result, but I'm looking for some thoughts on how best to work on the fine details of the photo, such as her hair, and the lace on her dress.

Also curious how the skin tones look to others. On my monitor, the skin is fairly yellow, even though I bumped up the red of the highlights. On my printer, it looks perfect (although the dress looks too pink on the printer). Time to attempt calibrating the monitor again, methinks.

Anyway, here's the original scan.

And the work-in-progress colorized version.

Wonderful job! I can never make something like this come out quite so nice. My faforite site for this was http://www.retouchpro.com but for some reason it is not coming up tonight. Right off hand, I'd play with the shading on the hair somewhat; it seems to be "sitting on top of" the head, rather than wrapped around it. I'd also guess that the lace should be mostly white. Maybe think about reflecting some of the pink into the skin shadows.

...and into the gray of the seat shadow.

Thanks for the link Misha! I wandered around that site for about an hour last night. I like how they post challenges for all visitors to play with. Good way to work on your skills.

I still didn't find much info on how to approach hair though. I agree that is kinda looks like a wig right now. One thing that I tried that did work was tinting the base black and white layer. It works wonderfully on the hair, but throws off the rest of the colors. If I can figure out a good way to mask it, I may do it that way.

I also agree about the lace. The problem there is that the pink should show through the lace, so it's basically just a time-consuming task of deselecting the bits that I want to show through. I'll also try the reflecting idea and see what happens.

-Taltos