Yesterday, I made a wonderful discovery. Tucked behind a wedding photo of my parents were two old photographs of my grandfather that I had never seen before. One was sepia-toned but the other was hand-painted. I had seen a few hand-painted photos in my grandmother’s collection before, so I asked my mother what the story was behind hand-painting photos. She explained that tinting photos was a craft that many people indulged in during the latter part of the 1800s and the early 1900s. It was an art form as well as a way to make black and white photos seem more interesting and realistic.
Swiss and French photographers began experimenting with various methods and pigments to add color to photographic images as early as 1839, but the processes were costly and time-consuming with mixed results. These efforts focused mostly on commercial use. In the 1860s, hand-coloring photographs became popular in Japan as an art form. And later between 1900 to the 1940s – considered the golden age of hand-colored photography – interest in this fine art spread across the world. In the 1950s and 60s, hand-colored photographs from the early part of the century were widely sought after by collectors and in the 1970s this art form began to make a comeback with mixed media artists combining black and white photos with watercolors, oils, crayons, pastels, dyes, and other kinds of paint.
Fast forward to 2024, photo colorization is still an art form but also a much easier endeavor. At Gold Star Photo Solutions, we offer colorization as part of our restoration services which includes:
- High Resolution Scanning or Photography of Fragile Photographs
- Dust, Speck, and Tare Removal of Scanned Images
- Photo Recreation of Missing Sections of Photos
- Faded Photo Enhancements – using tone and color saturation
- Water Damaged Photo Repair – including photographs stuck to glass
- Red Eye Reduction
- Colorization
For more information about all our services and photo products, please contact us at info@goldstarphotosolutions.com or call us at 530-264-5995.