What Colour was Your Great-grandmother's Hair?

I just made another Photoshop video. This is about the color tinting (or "colored") an old photo. You may not know this, but again in 1800 - long before the invention of color photography - people used to hand-tint black and white photo with colored ink or water color paintings, and I wanted to achieve such an effect. Tinting monochrome prints using Photoshop is much less messy! The photo I decided to use a recently restored photo of my maternal great-grandmother (my mother, mother, mother). It was taken sometime in the late 1880s, when probably in his teens. It is a typical Victorian studio portrait: Great grandmother has been her best dress, stands on a painted background of a garden, and has one hand on a rustic look. The president only knew that the grandmother had blue eyes, all colors other was a guess. Her dress was dark, and after experimenting with a couple of different colors, I decided that blue looked better. I light green in the background - although i! t could have been cyan. The bamboo chair was obviously a bamboo color. That just left the color of his hair trying to find out. My maternal grandmother had strawberry-blond hair in his youth (I have seen color photos of her when she was young), but when I tried hair color from her mother that the color simply did not look good. Too clear. Auburn? No, that did not look good either. I asked my mother, but she had no idea. Great-grandmother was a white-haired old when my mother came along. The only thing I could do was just to play around with the color sliders until his hair was "correct." That's when I made a profound discovery: my great grandmother's hair was brown - like mine! Was the only color that seemed natural. My grandmother and I did not know, but thanks to Photoshop, I now have a better idea of what appeared to have been possible only by a black and white photo. He published his picture on my website. Shaun Pearce is a writer and video maker. His ! latest production "Photoshop Master" shows you how t! o get th e most from Photoshop, and can be downloaded from http://www.learnphotoshopfast.com.