October, 2007
Coloriage by Akvis is a compact little program that works well for giving some pizzazz to old black and white photos or changing colors of full color photos. It can be used as a stand alone or as a plug-in. It is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Xara Xtreme, and Corel Paint Shop Pro. I used it as both the stand alone version and as a plug-in through Adobe CS. They both worked equally as well.
I received Coloriage via download with an activation key via email. I had no installation or activation problems.
Here is a screenshot of the canvas:
This program doesn’t come with many tools, but not many are needed. The tools included are as follows:
-Pencil tool to define where colors will be added or changed
-Keep Pencil tool to define where colors will remain the same
-Eraser
-Tube tool for changing the color of a single stroke
-Magic Tube tool for changing the color of multiple strokes of the same color
-Multiple undo levels
-Eyedropper
-Brightness preview to show what the rendered result will look like
Other tools included are the stroke saver and stroke loader for allowing for future edits. I however could not get these to work. Every time I tried to load a saved stroke piece I received an error message.
It also comes with many preset color choices for things such as hair, skin, eyes, wood, metal, and fabric.
Coloriage reminds me of an upscale coloring book. I had fun getting to know this program. Although there were a few problems I experienced. For coloring in black and white photos it does a great job. For coloring in sketches it does a great job. When I tried to change the color of a colored photo I had a hard time to getting things to blend correctly.
In this example I tried to change the shirt color. After several attempts of trying to get the color to blend with the hair I gave up.
This was my first pass - not very good at all:
Second attempt:
Third and final attempt:
Things were starting to improve as I really narrowed down the size of the keep tool to size 1, but even then I couldn’t get the blending of the hair to look right.
In this example I used an apple photo I had taken.
First attempt:
I used blue for illustration purposes. The blue was still bleeding onto the leaves so I tried again. I was very careful to follow the exact outline of the leaves with the keep tool. This took me several minutes to do but the results were much better than with the shirt exercise.
After I was happy with the results, I used the Magic Tube and changed the blue to a golden color for this result:
I had no problems at all using Coloriage on old black and whites. I was really happy with the results and how easy it was to accomplish.
This photo of my Mother is from 1945:
This photo of my Father is from 1938:
Here one of my sketches from original to colorized:
Even with the few issues I had, overall I found Coloriage by Akvis to be a fun little program. I still have many black and whites I want to color to see the results. I would recommend this program to all photo restoring and scrapbooking enthusiasts.
Pricing: $97.00
Company Website: www.akvis.com
Requirements:
Windows
- Pentium III, 512 Mb RAM
- res.1024?768, 50 Mb HDD
- Core Duo, 2 Gb, 2Gb RAM
-
res.1280?1024, 2 Gb HDD
Macintosh
- OS X 10.3.9, PPC G3, 512 Mb RAM
- res.1024?768, 50 Mb HDD
- OS X 10.4.6, Intel/G5, 2Gb RAM
-
res.1280?1024, 2 Gb HDD
Copyright (c) 2007, Amy Feulner, All Rights Reserved
