AKVIS Coloriage is a digital photograph color-changing plugin that is compatible with Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, and a number of other image editing applications. It’s also available as a standalone product so anyone can take advantage of its abilities.
One of the major applications of the utility is to colorize black and white photographs in a natural-looking manner, but it can also be used to change colors in a photo, recolor selected areas, and convert color images to black and white.
To see how easy the software was to use, I downloaded a black and white photograph of Theodore Roosevelt from the National Archives and Records Administration. The images below show the original photo along with the colorized one that was created in Coloriage in less than five minutes. (Click any image for a larger view.)
There were no problems that appeared in the download of AKVIS Coloriage, and the installation of both the standalone and plugin versions of the application was quick and simple. Depending on which directory you choose to use when installing the application, you may have to perform an extra step or two so that your photo editing program can access the plugin. If you’re using Paint Shop Pro, see Installing Paint Shop Pro Third-Party Plugins for more details.
Overall, Coloriage has a very intuitive user interface even though it may take a little bit of practice to learn how to get the best results when editing a photo. Basically, all you have to do is choose your colors, outline the areas that you want to change, and apply the changes. The process is the same whether you use the plugin or the standalone version.
One of the things that can make colorization very time-consuming and tedious in other image editing programs is the actual choosing of the colors. With its vast Color Library, Coloriage offers a distinct advantage over many other applications. While you still have the option of defining custom color shades, the Color Library includes a number of palettes that allow you to quickly and easily choose a color for common items such as eyes, skin tones, wood, water, stones, and metals.
The diameter of the tools used to apply and remove the color strokes can also be easily modified by clicking on the tool and adjusting a slider. However, this method of adjustment can be a little unwieldy when you’re trying to pick an exact setting, and it would be nice if there were also the option to type in the precise value here.
Coloriage does an excellent job of both blending colors and recognizing edges, allowing you to change the colors of overlapping objects so that each one is distinct without any bleed over from surrounding items. Although that may sound simple enough in practice, it’s actually a lot harder than many realize and it can take a long time to manually achieve such results when constrained to working with standard photo editing tools.
In the end, I found Coloriage extremely impressive for the quality of the results that can be achieved with the minimal input of effort and time.
Next: Continue to page 2 for the conclusion of this review which includes a discussion of the price and overall rating.