40 Old Colorized Photos That Might Change The Way You Perceive History By Sebastien De Oliveira (New Pics)

Bored Panda got in touch with Sebastien again to get to know more about him and his creative process. The artist shared that he is nearly at a thousand images colorized by now! That's an impressive number, so we got curious about whether his colorizing technique has changed over time. The artist replied that after the first three years where he was experimenting, he needed to crystallize the process in order to be liberated from the "how to do it" and to concentrate on the choices of colors or the general atmospheres he wanted to show.

"My technique is polished now so basically I don’t need to think about it. It doesn’t mean I don’t make efforts to improve it but the more technical parts are completely automatic for me now, so I really only think about the artistic choices and the ways to go further on the time machine effect."

Sebastien colorizes images that depict people, actions, or feelings and when they tell a little story: "I see the possibilities in the original image, also with basic elements like trees, sea, or sand, to already imagine what color it will be and try to figure out a way to equilibrate the future colorization. I always go to see the Library of Congress and the FSA collection, of course, but I can be inspired by other Instagram accounts that give me ideas, like @classy_badasssery for instance, that have lots of cool images. Otherwise, it is just during random surfing on the internet. It is rare that people give me an image to colorize but it has happened, and it’s always a joy to see people seeing their ancestors in color for the first time!"

Sebastien revealed that until now, colorizing was only a hobby that he was taking "way too seriously". "My real job is a retoucher for the fashion industry in Paris. I can take some commissions if the subjects and the images are interesting. I just began a collaboration with the magazine France-Amérique in New York for illustrating an article. Recently colorization took a bigger place in my occupations."

Sebastien makes everything on Photoshop. Here's how he describes his process: "the process is quite simple and complex at the same time, first restoring the original monochrome image, cleaning the dust and scratches and preparing it to receive the color layer. Second, creating paths to be able to select all the different elements in the image means spending time on clipping. After that, the moment arrives to choose the colors to put on top of the black and white image. The fourth step will be my special treatment, I take a scale of five grey and I color it in a way to give every tone of color a different orientation. For making it simple, the same color will be more blue in the dark and more yellow in the light, it gives a natural tone to the image. Other settings are required for giving the color a more saturated and solid aspect. I finish with a color grain in the overall surface of the image to give another argentic aspect."

"With all the different aspects of the process, it can take quite some time to colorize a picture but it really depends on the subject. If it is only a portrait with no complicated background it can be only an hour and if it is a street with cars and people it can be several hours. My job as a retoucher gave me the dexterity of working quite fast, it is what happened when you work on the same program for 8 hours a day for the last 18 years."

The artist also shared that his book "Back to America!" has just been released in France! "I worked on it from the beginning of the year and it compiles 180 colorized images from the ’40s. It is such a great accomplishment for me that now I have difficulties imagining what will happen after that, another book maybe, other collaborations for articles, it seems to be only the beginning of the adventure."

If you're interested, you can order the book here.