Following a recent article on my website about colouring black and white photos I thought I'd have another go and found this photo of lunch carts on Broad Street in New York circa 1906. With lots of detail it was certainly going to involve a lot of masking and seeing as I ended up using 127 layers this was the most complex photo I've worked on so far.

As before I found the best result was to first convert the photo to CMYK instead of RGB. This photo was an interesting learning curve for me as I learned a couple of new skills about how to paint different layers of colours on top of each other and blend them together which is sometimes more accurate, natural looking and a faster way of working.

I have a few more photos in mind to work on next, one of which was taking during the Blitz but I think I will need to learn a couple more skills before I can complete these.

You can view a before and after of this photo below.