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Here's a simple tutorial that will result in a photo like those old hand-tinted photos. The process of hand-coloured photographs back in the "thirties and forties" required a certain amount of skill and a nice light touch - the best examples of old hand-coloured photos are those that have aged gracefully, with a lovely soft pastel tone.

The digital process, however, is really quite simple. Hand colouring old photos can take a little time, or a lot of time, depending on what type of photo you are planning to colour and how many of the details you want to colour. Images like landscapes or interiors that contain a lot of small details may take quite a long while, while a simple portrait can be done fairly quickly.

This works on old landscape, still life, or portrait images. Essentially, any old black and white photo you want to tint. The beauty of doing this digitally is the layers - layering each colour and section of the image separately allows you to continually adjust the colour and tone without having to redo anything; blending modes and opacity adjustments do it all once you have the basic colours in place.

If you like to colour, you'll enjoy this. The tutorial is short - the text amounts to less than a page (but the included photos stretch it to 3 pages). While the tutorial is short, completing the work on your image is likely to take you a fair bit longer than reading the tutorial, depending on complexity.

You can choose to colour only parts of an image (selective colouring), or colour all of it. The image used in my tutorial took me about 20 minutes to complete since it's a portrait with little in the way to colour. The effects, I think, are rather spendid though.