Hues of my Heritage
Digitizing and colorizing my ancestors’ portraits
Background
I know very little about my Dad’s side of the family. My Dad grew up in Greece, Afghanistan, and Ghana before even graduating high school, and I am always learning new crazy stories about his life.
Out of this curiosity this spring, I asked my Dad if he had any photos of his childhood. He had hundreds of photo slides sitting in his closet and a whole photo album of family portraits. I looked at a few of the slides, and most of them were miscolored, scratched, or completely monochrome. I thought it would be cool to digitize these photos and make them look like they could have been taken today.
Process of Colorizing
To colorize these photos, I used photoshop to retouch any blemishes on the slides and correct the colors in each image. First, I would crop the image to make the subject the center of the frame. I would also touch up any scratches or folds in the slides or photos. My family apparently loved to fade out the corners of their portraits. I wanted each photo to fit in a square frame, so I also needed to fill in these corner pixels. From there, I used a camera raw filter to change the hue, contrast, and other elements of the image to make it look more realistic. Finally, I created a new color layer where I manually colored the photographs. I decided on the colors by imagining what I thought they would really look like.
Final Photographs
Here are a few of the photographs that I converted (and their originals)
