Hollyhocks Happenings: Hand Colored Prints

Back in the days of the darkroom, and especially before color film came into existence, if you wanted an image in color, it had to be hand-tinted. This was a special process - you had to use fiber paper and special transparent paints. The transparent paints would allow the details below to show through. Also, darker or shadowed areas would be darker underneath the paint, giving depth to the image. This process is still in existence, though fewer and fewer people do it. You actually have to have a film negative and a darkroom to do it. The print had to be prepared with a special solution prior to painting, which enabled you to remove the paint if you made a mistake. Mixing colors was also part of the process, trying to get the look you wanted. Below is an example of an actual hand-tinted print I've made. I enlarged the original negative (from 1942!), printed it on fiber paper and hand-tinted it. This is actually my mother on her honeymoon. I love how you can see the reflection of the mountains on the side of the car. The car was not originally that color red either! That's the beauty of hand-tinting, you can pick whatever color you want.

These days, most hand-tinting is done on the computer. I'm sure you could use several programs, but I use Photoshop to do this. The beauty of Photoshop is that you can play with colors all the day long - even after you paint, you can alter them. The print below is for a friend - she asked me to hand-tint this image of her grandmother from an unknown decade - probably the 20's or 30's. It's still a work in progress, but you can sense that old-time feel. The challenge of this image is all the greenery. If hand-tinting is something that interests you, I would suggest you chose images that have simple backgrounds. The original photograph was taken in Florida and is a little soft or unfocused. Because I do not have the original negative to print, I scanned the copy my friend had and went from there. The trickiest part of hand-tinting, whether with paint or Photoshop, is skin tones. Generally, you'll find that most artists will keep the skin tones very low-key, as shown here. The one big disadvantage to scanning prints is quality. With a negative, you can enlarge it quite a bit. When you scan an image, the image is the same size as the item you scanned. So, while you can enlarge it a bit, you are limited because it will start pixelating if you try and make it too much larger than the print you're scanning. Of course, the higher the resolution of your scan, the better the print quality will be and the more options you'll have for enlarging.