The Benefits Of Colorizing Your Old Photos
True Colors: Breathe New Life Into Old Photos With Colorization
All of us have black-and-white photos that are left from generations past. The question is, should you take the time to colorize your photo? With an abundance of affordable yet professional photo colorization services, we think it’s a good idea…and we have compiled some reasons why!
The Colorization Process Doesn’t Harm Your Photo
Colorization used to mean that someone will take your precious family heirloom and color it manually, so there is an assumption that coloring photos could damage them. But that is simply not the case now. With technology like Photoshop, you don’t have to sacrifice your black-and-white photo to colorize it.
With modern colorization services (like those offered at IRC), you simply send in your photo – or even a picture of your photo – to be colorized. It’s all done digitally so you can keep your original and negatives.
It Breathes New Life Into Old Memories
Black-and-white photos are #aesthetic, but colorizing them could tell you something about your past you didn’t know about before. The advantage of colorizing old photos is that you get to see them from a new perspective. Lots of details can get lost in the shades of grayscale, so color can bring out new details for you to discover.
If you have old black-and-white photos in your home from generations past, wouldn’t it be interesting to colorize them and find out something new about your forebears? What if your grandmother’s wedding dress was blue instead of the traditional white? Wouldn’t that change how you see her?
You never know what you’ll find out from coloring old photos. Maybe you never realized how much you looked like a great uncle or another relative until you’ve seen them in living color.
It Makes a Great Gift For Family Members
Every family has that one family member who is impossible to shop for. Every occasion, you wrack your brains and can’t think of anything good.
A colorized photo might be the perfect gift to get them. Many people are sentimental about old photos – breathing new life into them by colorizing them will get you loads of props at the next family gathering.
Don’t forget to put them in a proper frame and package them nicely! It makes a big difference when you go the extra mile to display your colorized photo as a work of art. And make no mistake, it is!
Colors Can Show You More Details
Some people think that black and white takes away distractions and makes you focus on the details of the photo, but colorization can also bring out details that were too faint to see in black and white. Freckles and other lighter textures can sometimes get lost. In vivid color, those textures come to life more making them more prominent and easier to pick out.
If you are looking at old photos for clothing and patterns, those kinds of details can often get lost in the black-and-white medium. Colorization can make those patterns more visible and prominent especially in the time periods when flashy colors were in vogue.
Colorizing Your Photos Can Give You A Glimpse Of History
You might get lucky and learn something about the history of your family by colorizing your photos. Maybe you have photos from the civil war, and colorizing the photo will help you get a better idea of which side they fought on. Or if the photo is from the turn of the century, you can see the colors in the outfits that were popular.
Seeing history in living color is a fascinating experience because it humanizes the people that you see in the photos. Suddenly, they aren’t just historical figures – they are people who had jobs and lives, wore fancy clothes, and went off to war…not unlike many people today!
Colorizing old photos also helps you see the world the way that people saw the world back then. Many older photos weren’t black and white to be dramatic but rather because that was the only technology of the time. By colorizing the photo, you are getting a window into that time in history.
Colorizing Your Photo Might Make Them More Visually Interesting
Black-and-white photos can be somber or elegant, but color can be arresting. A splash of color can be very visually stimulating and bring out more detail that black-and-white photos might mask.
Color might bring out the intensity of the eyes or the subject’s gaze. Portraits are especially good to colorize because they make the subject more human to our modern eyes.
Conclusion
These days there is very little downside to colorizing your old photos. It’s a difficult process but you don’t have to do it alone! There are reliable services that can send you colorized prints from pictures of your black-and-white photos. You get to keep the negative and the original, so you don’t have to worry about any harm coming to an heirloom.
Newly colorized photos also make great keepsakes and gifts, especially for older family members. Be careful – it might jog some memories and you might get stuck listening to stories for hours!
We hope you learned something new about colorization and will put some thought into colorizing your old family photos. The process is easy and there’s really nothing for you to lose. At the end of the day, you’ll end up with great photos to cherish, put up on your wall, and share with beloved friends and family.
