Photo Finish (ed!)

True class Snapper… enough said.

Well done mate-truly wonderful. 🙂

How about a little competition then,someone posts up a black and white picture of an aircraft and we can all have a go at doing a realistic version or simply let loose and go mad with it?

Excellent bit of work Snapper, i empathise with you on the amount of time it took. Great stuff.

Steve

Any chance of some aircraft pictures receiving this treatment? Because of all the conumdrums arising from WW2 colour schemes, you would probably end up fending up all sorts of claims of “inaccuracies” but it would be fun 🙂

Thanks for the comments guys.

In total, it took around 60-70 hours, and used 81 layers.

It started off at around 6″x4″ in black and white, an old print, that needed a little bit of restoration done to it – not a lot, just dust/water marks and scratches plus the censors wielding of scalpel from the original negative most probably.

Anyway, it was scanned in at 1600 dpi as a colour image on my Epson 1640 (16 bit?) and resized down to 12″x8″ at 300 dpi. A bit of USM (I forget how much it needed, but I don’t overdo it), and desaturated (NOT greyscale – you’ll see why in a minute).

The first thing to colour was the uniforms – the serge blue/grey. Using the lassoo tool, I selected the entire area that would be that colour, copied and pasted it. Then, using colour balance, (thats why RGB was neccesary) I was able to adjust it to just the right shade (I have a contemporary jacket) and then using hue/satuiration, to desaturate it enough to look realistic. This is the most accurate way I have found, as it doesn’t lose any detail – which a paintbrush-type tool does, and you also get variations in the lighter/darker areas that look more real. Then, and this is what tikes the time, using the eraser brush, zoomed in as close as neccesary and set at different sizes, I delete all the areas that I don’t want coloured, just leaving the blue uniforms. Job done, its time to select the next area – for example the wall of the building. As the grain of the wood is visible, it is clearly not painted. Contemporary wood treatment would most likely have been creosote (which smells beautiful) which is something we stuill use on wood such as telegraph poles. Same again, copy, paste, colour balance, hue/saturation, eraser tool. And so on for every different bit of colouring needed. Thats the reason that the skin tones are all so close too – they were one layer. Lips were done seperately, as were the teeth and the shadow areas (eyes etc). Once I was happy with each layer, I would ‘merge visible’, to save doing the deletion on multiple layers.

Some bits had to be researched as well – colour of the badge, the crown on it, the different styles of boots, the Mae-West lifejackets, gloves, the neckscarves (two are definately correct – unfortunately 3 had to be ‘artisticaly-licenced’).

As for printing, I run a Konica QD21 at work (until next week when I get made redundant due to lab closure – though I have somewhere else lined up to go to the first day I am free). The file (80mb roughly) is printed on here at 12″x18″ Konica Supre-Luxe QA Paper (lustre finish). And looks stunning! It’s now on my wall at home in a cream mount / black wood frame.

I also have a few more groups of the same squadron during the war, so could perhaps have a series of them, if I decide to become a hermit!!

Stunning….absolutely stunning.

Fabulous work, thanks for sharing with us!!
It looks like you have opened Photoshop at least once before!
The colour adds a realism to make it seem yesterday.

From a new Photoshop user wishing I could do the same,
Keith

Snapper that is superb, real dedication, very well done and thank you for sharing it with us.

Very nice work Snapper,top marks and then some!:)

great photo really brought to life. the wooden building the photo is taken against is still at Manston on the main road to the spitfire museum but now closed due to its delapidated condition, formerly also a museum

Unbelieveable piece of work that. A fantastic tribute to those men.

Snapper, that’s absolutely fabulous mate. 😀

Well done Snapper the picture looks superb!!! now that puts my photoshop skills to shame!

Thanks I like to know who is who, makes it all the more real.

Having just seen the original black & white photo in “The Years Flew Past”, I’m impressed.

Brilliant pic Mark, well done 🙂

Snapper,

Phew !!!
Now the trick is do you know what they had for tea that day 😉

Top marks chap – excellent work

S/Ldr Roland ‘Bee’ Beamont DSO* DFC* and his pilots in dispersal doorway, Manston, March 1943.

Standing L-R: F/O Howard Skett (6/42 – 8/43), F/Lt Erik Haabjoern DFC (2/43 – 8/43), F/O George ‘Moose’ Evans (6/41 – 8/43), S/Ldr Roland ‘Bee’ Beamont DSO* DFC* (6/42 – 5/43), F/O Matthew ‘Paddy’ Cameron (1/43 – 5/43), F/O Peter ‘Slosher’ Raw DFC (6/42 – 6/43), F/Sgt Lawrence ‘Pinkie’ Stark DFC* AFC (1/43 – 9/45), F/O Antoni ‘Tony’ Polek (11/42 – 4/43). L-R: Sgt Chester West (2/43 – 5/43), F/Lt J Humphreys (2/43 – 4/43), P/O Geoffrey ‘Geoff’ Stevens (11/42 – 4/43), F/O Remy ‘Mony’ Van Lierde DFC** (14/01/42 – 22/12/43), Adj Plt André ‘Mel / Le Men’ Blanco (20/1/42 – 28/10/43), F/Lt Jonathan ‘Johnny’ Wells DFC (12/5/42 – 6/44), F/O Roy Payne (30/6/42 – 21/7/43), F/O Raymond ‘Cheval’ Lallemand DFC* (30/9/41 – 14/9/44). Dogs are Blitz and Spit.

Superb!!!!

Can you put names to faces?