What colour was your great-grandmothers hair? - elder-care

I've just made an added Photoshop video. This one is about colour tinting (or "colorizing") an old photo. You may not know this, but back in the 1800's - long beforehand colour camera work was imaginary - ancestors used to hand-tint black and white photographs with coloured inks or water-colour paints, and I sought after to do that type of effect. Tinting monochrome prints using Photoshop is by a long way less messy!

The photo I absolute to use was a freshly restored photo of my caring great-grandmother (my mother's, mother's, mother). It was taken a bit in the late 1880's when she in all probability in her late teens. It's a average Victorian studio portrait: Great-grandma is exhausting her best dress, is durable aligned with a painted backdrop of a garden, and has one hand resting on a country looking chair.

The only thing I knew for a selection of was that Great-grandma had blue eyes, every other colour was a conjecture. Her dress was a dark colour, and after experimenting with a few atypical colours, I categorical that navy blue looked best. I coloured in the circumstances light green - though it could have been cyan. The wicker chair was evidently a rattan colour. That just left the colour of her hair to try and appear out.

My kind grandmother had strawberry-blonde hair in her younger days (I've seen colour photos of her when she was young) but when I tried to colour her mother's hair that colour, it just didn't look right. Too light. Auburn? No, that didn't look right either. I asked my mother, but she had no idea. Great-grandma was a white-haired old lady by the time my care for came along.

The only thing I could do was just to play about with the colour sliders until her hair looked "right". That's when I made a profound discovery: my great-grandmother's hair was brown - like mine! It was the only colour that looked natural.

My great-grandmother and I never met, but credit to Photoshop, I now have a advance idea of what she looked like than would have been feasible just from a black and white photo.

I've posted her adventure on my webpage.

Shaun Pearce is a critic and video maker. His hottest fabrication "Photoshop Master" shows you how to get the most from Photoshop, and can be downloaded from http://www. learnphotoshopfast. com.