Re-Colouring a Tin Type Photograph
So to start off with, what is a tintype? A tintype, also known as a ferrotype, is a photograph created by making a direct positive onto a thin sheet of metal that has been coated with a dark lacquer or enamel to be used as the support for the photographic emulsion. The height of their use was between 1860 to 1870 however they were still used somewhat up until the next century and many enthusiasts now have revived this way of photography for their own personal use or for the novelty of it.
In regards to this specific photograph I came about it during a visit to my favourite antique store (post coming soon) and even though it was in far from good condition I had to buy it, multiple jokes about me bringing some kind of ghost or curse to the house where made but with all that aside it still is a very haunting photograph. I dont have the exact date it was taken and I haven't come across a good way of finding out but I would assume early 1900's or just before the turn of that century, photography was still a very expensive commodity back then so either this girl came from a well off household or this was one of the only pictures ever taken of her. It's relatively strange to think about older photos such as this, especially one this old, once upon a time this had been someones daughter and the child herself would have lived and died long before the image came into my possession...
Well with the backstory covered lets re-colour this!
Step One:
Fixing minor blemishes and edges.
Original Image
After edge re-touch
I haven't attempted any fixing of the face of hands at this point, it's usually best to give yourself a good background to work with first as to not get ahead of yourself, build it all up in layers and dont forget to name them either it helps a lot! You will end up with a massive amount of layers at the finish so try to stay organised with it.
Step Two:
Re-creating the second eye.
After eye fix
So all I really did here was make a copied selection of the eye that I then copied over to the other side of the face and rotated slightly to look natural, after some minor shading adjustments to the nose and the side of the eye it's pretty much done.
Step Three:
Getting rid of the blur on the dress and fixing the dent on the hand.
So the front is very blurry and due to the pattern fixing that would either be a few days worth of work or just impossible even then, what I decided upon doing was creating small selections of the pattern on the not so blurry areas and the layering them over the blur with the opacity turned down so that it looked a little bit more in focus. I only did this so certain sections because I felt it would look to fake if I did the whole thing and at the end of the day I'm trying to go for a natural look to this.
Step Four:
Adding the background colour.
I opted for a deep blue background as many period photographs are taken with these types of backdrops, this was made by selecting the background and modifying the hue and saturation in a new layer and then I adjusted the level curves on a new layer too.
Step Five:
Adding the facial tones.
After colouring the skin tones with multiple layers of hue and saturation masks, I also added in the lip and eye colour, I went for a very natual pinkish tone for the lips and i made the assumption that the girl would have had brown eyes so I altered that slightly and then lightened the eye ball around it to get rid of the yellow tones.
Step Six:
Adding the hair colour.
I ended up going with a dark reddish brown for the hair as that was my closest guess from the image, I had initially believed her to be a dark blonde but I think it would have been lighter in the original image if that were the case. Again this was created in the same way that I changed the skin tones, Multiple layers of saturation and contrast adjustments.
Step Seven:
Colouring the dress.
So this was by far the biggest challenge I faced with this image, probably took me in all a few hours and honestly I'm still not completely happy with it, but due to the pattern unless I go down to the pixel level and colour by hand it just won't look right, I went for a darker blue out of the two colours I was contemplating because it suited more, I was thinking about maybe a dark red but it looked very very strange in contrast to the rest of the image.
Step Eight :
Trying my best to make the belt not look as weird...
So I came to the conclusion that in the same way the dress blur was ridiculous this would also be, it showed up as pure white on the image with no identifiable details for me to work with so I just added some shading around the edges and changed the shade of it in the hope that it would at least be a bit better.
The Finished Image:
I did a few more minor tone adjustments and this is the final image, the belt will always annoy me but overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, I definitely wanna do more of these so if you guys like this kind of post let me know!
Comments