Captured Civil War 'Contraband' (1862) Photo Restoration and Colourisation 

Thank you very much for your support and thoughtful message! My goal is always to try and bridge the gap between the modern world and the old, not to try and improve on or replace the original photograph. I actually have had quite a few comments saying that adding colour has made the people in the pictures seem 'real' or 'alive again' and that always makes me happy as that reviving of the subjects is what I enjoy the most about the process. Funnily enough, as a slight tangent, I think what some people dislike about colourisation is exactly that we make the past more emotionally accessible? I've seen people get really upset and angry before with other peoples colourisations of emotionally raw subjects from the past, particularly war pictures, and they leave comments like "Why didn't you leave this horrible picture in the past!". People can see an event, even an upsetting one, which has been famously documented in B&W and the second it's coloured people are transported back to that moment and suddenly become disturbed by an image they may have seen and ignored hundreds of times previously. It's like a really weird magic trick, which you can create in a few hours in Photoshop. J

I agree, I think the worst thing that can happen is to find yourself in the 'Endless March' stage of a project. I'm glad that I worked on this picture but i can't say the process of working with it was particularly enjoyable in the exact way that I worked on it. I think had I worked as you do, and taken breaks from it to work on other images, i may have found the process a bit less stressful. Thank you for your thoughtful comment and I also like your work! :)

Thank you so much and thank you for the suggestion! It's certainly something i'd consider for the future. I will say that as things get a bit closer to the modern day I sometimes find it harder to know how best to present these pictures? Particularly when it's something that I worry I that i'm not that well informed in and might upset people accidentally with how i choose to tell the story behind a picture? THAT BEING SAID, as I talked about in the President video, I view these pictures as an opportunity to learn about a time in history and improve my knowledge of it and given my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War is somewhat lacking, working on a picture from it would certainly be useful for me from an education point of view. :)

Thank you so much for your very thoughtful comment, and for sharing the video! :) Sharing videos is so, so helpful for building a RU-vid channel and while I never get given any personal information, obviously, for who has shared my videos, or to whom, I'm always happy when RU-vid tells me a % of my viewers are coming from WhatsApp or similar as I know someone has taken the time to recommended my video out to someone. So I do really appreciate it! And yes, us James's have to stick together! :D

Thank you! Honestly, I'm not sure and I think it would depend on working methods? When I first started I would often work with CDV's and other usually naturally sepia images and I found that making the colours look natural was quite tricky unless I had completely removed any existing colour tint to begin with as i would be having to try and counter the existing tint when i picked colours. I think it would depend a lot of which exact method of colourisations you're using. For my method these days I'm using the 'Color' blend mode on a layer. It completely replaces any underlying colour with your chosen painted colour, therefore any tints in the image will be replaced. For the most part I keep, throughout the process, adjusting the contrast of the black and white image until I get one that feels natural to me. I can completely understand the need to adjust the values in advance when painting on real paper as obviously the ability to constantly tweak the contrast wouldn't exist. I would completely 100% recommend getting into it again and I'd say check out R/ Colorization on Reddit as the community there is really good. :)

It is really amazing how comparatively close it is historically to where we are now. As I was colouring this image that fact became ever more true to me. Thank you for your comment!

Thank you!! :)

Thank you once again for the lovely comment :)

Thank you so much! :D

Thank you! :)

Thank you very much! I always like to hear where my viewers are from :)

I'm afraid i'm not currently doing private commissions at this moment in time. I don't know if you've checked out r/colorizationrequests on Reddit before but i'd recommenced going on there if you're looking for someone to colour a picture, as you can put up [Paid] requests and have people message you rates for a picture/check out their work. Also there are actually some pretty decent people on there who are completely happy to do them for free. Sorry I can't be more helpful. J

100% PSD, since that way you can save your layers/adjustments and return to edit them if needed later! :)

I'll certainly add him to my list as I've been interested in covering more musicians. I have got my next few videos planned but as I say, he's in the text document!

@@JBColourisation Great. The Doors are a band that I highly enjoy