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Niki Lauda — Sunday 28th March 1976 Long Beach
Another go at colouring a black and white photo. The full colour image above is only 75% the size of the full colouring I did due to Tumblr's image size limit.
Some explanation to my process below.
From what I learned with the previous image, I did a lot more manual editing on this one to hammer out more of the small details. The days of colouring it took just to get the overall picture, aside:
Had to desaturate his hair and skin from my original colouring. Niki's a lot more ash-brown than first assumed. He's also a pale lil' rat with some notable five-o'clock shadow and some minor pockmarking.
The sunglasses also ended up being further desaturated because I think an aspect of the time's colour photography made the lenses appear much more orange than they were in reality.
Four different very shades of red I had to keep track of the palette for, please save me.
Manually went back and desaturated/detailed the shading on the fireproof and jacket's stitching, and the black of the inner-jacket.
Manually detailed his skin more where some shadow and flush was not captured in the original black and white, or was lost when coloured. Skin is the hardest part to capture in colouring, so please tell me how I did!
Manually painted in all his flyaway hairs and the temple and sideburn area.
Manually placed back in a lot of lost shadow throughout pretty much the whole thing.
Manually fixed some photo degradation and other photo issues, and ran it through Topaz to denoise the image to make it easier to detail the colours in.
Added a very minor warm lightening tint since the day was so bright. It also adds colour continuity, which helps it look more natural.
All of Niki is coloured fully accurately to the times and to real life. Only the background (not including the road and concrete barrier) has been coloured with some amount of creative liberty, though it still matches the colour of the area from other photos.
Please tell me what you think, and if you know any photos that might look really nicely coloured. Who knows, maybe I'll take coms for it.
Niki Lauda — Sunday 28th March 1976 Long Beach - Preparing Shortly Before the Race, Niki Would Finish P2
It took a long while, but finally I finished colouring this black-and-white photo.
Everything has been colour matched to be as accurate as possible to how it was in real life, guided by other colour photos of the event. Though, some exceptions had to be taken, such as the hair and clothing colour of background people.