Almost two years ago I wrote about the ColorizedHistory Community on Reddit, whose 85,000 members have devoted themselves to colourising historic black-and-white photographs. In order to give anyone who might be curious an idea of how much work is involved in this, I included a video tutorial by Mads Madsen, who was one of the most active and prominent members of the aforementioned group at that point. However, as interesting as Madsen’s video might be, it only shows the colouring of an albeit not perfect, but still rather well-preserved photo.
In this 3 minute long time laps video by Joaquin Villaverde which I discovered today, the professional Argentinian photographer and retoucher goes one step further. He demonstrates how he colourises as well as retouches a very old and very badly damaged portrait in Photoshop CC 2014 in two hours. The before-after picture is a screenshot I took towards the end of the video. Impressive, right?
Also interesting is the following video by Villaverdes, in which he whips another, equally damaged photo into shape, even though he does not colour it. 🙂