The Process of Colorizing and Animating an 80-Year-Old Photograph

Photo colorizer and restorer Hint of Time has shared an 8-minute video where he shows his process for not only colorizing an 80-year-old black and white photo, but also brings it to life with subtle animation.

While usually stopping at colorizations on his YouTube Channel, Hint of Time decided to go one step further with this latest work on a photo of a New Jersey farmworker taken by Mario Wolcott in 1941.

“I decided to add a little twist and not only colorize but also give this photograph a 3D effect,” he writes. “It took me about 5 hours to colorize and animate this old black and white photograph in Photoshop and After Effects.”

Hint of Time has uploaded multiple videos that show his process for colonization, and his results are rather impressive:

There are some prominent historians that argue the colorization of history should be avoided, but Hint of Time says that he does his research to make sure that the colors he adds are as true to life as possible.

“When I do colorization or restoration work on an old black and white photo I always do research before anything else and try to find the colors of historically significant elements like uniforms, a person’s features, buildings, or even popular color palettes of the decade,” he writes. “The colors are then adapted to the scene in the photograph and added by hand with the help of Adobe Photoshop. Color accuracy is more important than perfectly drawing over the edges. The objective is to have an end result with colors as historically accurate as possible. The research, colorization, and restoration are processes that take a long time but the dramatic comparison of the black-and-white photos and the colorized version of the picture always makes it worth the hard work.”

For more from Hint of Time, subscribe to his YouTube Channel or follow him on Instagram.