Racing Spitfire N.17 in colour

Nice one Chris,
Interesting effort. I always liked these pre-war aero shows. Quite the period pieces.

Why should Chris ‘be careful’ because someone else might undertake shoddy research? Let’s remember we are all responsibe for our own errors. If someone chooses to fool themselves that this is a genuine pre-war colour photo, then they get the results they deserve. We all make mistakes, blaming others for our own shortcomings is poor show. Chiz.

Or were you joking? 😀

Of course it’s speculativve, but it looks good to me – I hope a Spitfire experten will be along shortly for more qualified comment.

Chris, what process / program did you use?

Yes, that’s what I meant! It looks so good that you could be fooled into thinking it was a real colour photo. I really meant that ‘others’ have to be careful not to accept it as such, in case someone uses it as a reference where no colour photo exists! Speculation is a dangerous thing if taken seriously! :rolleyes:

You know you want to! 😉 😀

I like it, Chris!

There needs to be a downloadable Speed Spitfire! 😉

Oh no – you’ve done it now! I’m gonna have to skin this baby for IL2 now… As if i haven’t got enough to do already!! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

I like it, Chris!

There needs to be a downloadable Speed Spitfire! 😉

Very nice indeed. Of course the blue is going to be open to (endless) speculation, but you’ve used a shade very close to the colour I used when I modelled N17 many years ago – possibly slightly brighter.

On the fuselage flash, there seems to be some disagreement whether it was silver or gold in colour. I have seen both represented in drawings of the machine. From the B/W photo there seems to be little variation in tone between the N17 and flash. I used silver on my model and it looked great!

It would be great to see a restored Spitfire in this scheme sometime, even if the other mods couldn’t be acheived.

Thanks for your comments guys, most appreciated! I use Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and the processes i’m using invlove lots of layers, colour fills with different layer fill moes, opacities etc and overall colour balance and brightness adjustment. The magic wand tool is a god send. What you see is about three hours work so far. The picture was posted on this forum a while ago and i just loved it. It screamed at me to be ‘coloured in’ so i thought i’d give it a shot. I’ve a long way to go till i get to Snappers standard though 😉

I’m going to do a little more work on it soon, i agree with your points Bert and will try to address them.

Thanks again guys!

Not U-2……again.

Very nice.

I like it.

Mark

Looks great Chris!

If you want encouragement to finish it, here it is :p
I would vary two or 3 shades of green on the flowers.
As for the suits, whatelse did they have than grey, black and brown in those days?

The overexposure on the windows looks natural, but probably the drapers had a lighter but contrasting colour, maybe matching the carpets..

You made me want to make a model, and i dont careif it is not correct, it just plainly looks beautiful. A mistake I’ll happily make 🙂

Nice one Chris,
Interesting effort. I always liked these pre-war aero shows. Quite the period pieces.

Be careful in case someone uses this as a reference for a model as some people can be very particular over their shades of blue

Why should Chris ‘be careful’ because someone else might undertake shoddy research? Let’s remember we are all responsibe for our own errors. If someone chooses to fool themselves that this is a genuine pre-war colour photo, then they get the results they deserve. We all make mistakes, blaming others for our own shortcomings is poor show. Chiz.

Or were you joking? 😀

Of course it’s speculativve, but it looks good to me – I hope a Spitfire experten will be along shortly for more qualified comment.

Chris, what process / program did you use?

VERY good…but colouring in an old b/w photo can only be speculation as to the correct colour. Be careful in case someone uses this as a reference for a model as some people can be very particular over their shades of blue :rolleyes: