Black Magic

The coloring of black and white photos has been performed quite a long time ago when digital photography has not been heard of yet. And all this time the job demanded skill and precision.

In the new age of digital images and Photoshop we still want to make some of our old black and white photos be seen in color. The process is still to a great extent manual and only a few software developers make attempts at automating it.

One of the programs attempting to quicken and simplify the colorization process is Black Magic.

At a first glance the program just gives us the tools for coloring the black and white photos and a palette of preselected colors for mostly often found objects. But as we read the manual and, what is more important, try the program, other useful features become obvious.

First of all let’s say a few words about the color pallet. While you can indeed choose the colors independently from the whole specter in Black Magic, the necessary choice can be made much quicker with the Black Magic palette. It is ever present in the program window but opens also at a right click. The colors are grouped by objects – a number of colors offered for each. Black Magic allows new palettes to be created or imported. In Professional edition of the program the colors can also be tuned. The palettes considerably save time, of course.

Now to the tools. There are a few of them – a Smart Brush, a Select Paint, an Eraser and a Magic Touch Paint. The most used of these is the Brush, probably. The manual, though, starts explanations with the Select Paint that can fill the rectangular selection with the chosen color.

Such convenience makes the process much quicker but a more flexible selection tool (an analog of lasso in Photoshop at least) could be even more effective. So far Black Magic only offers a Smart Paint-brush to cover all the areas that do not fall within rectangular boundaries.

Neither Select Paint nor Smart Paint-brush just paint over the black and white image. The color is rather blended with the original (Neuraltek uses its own algorithm) taking into account all luma information there is in the gray pixels. The resulted look is natural enough providing you are correct with the colors.
Compensating the not so effective selection tool Black Magic offers an overwrite on/off mode. With overwrite off the paint tools leave off the already colored areas.

Another mode affecting the result is “layered”. When “layered” option is on the new color is blended with the color already covering the area. Though, the effect is difficult to apply to complex areas, such as hair for example.

The lack of any tools softening the edges is another Black Magic shortcoming. The edges are hard to make smooth with only the Paint Brush and a steady hand at our disposal. The layered effect is also not so easy and convenient to apply.

Black Magic also offers a Magic Touch Paint. This one works similar to Photoshop Magic Wand but with instant coloring of the selection made on the basis of similar brightness of the pixels. The tool has only one parameter – Integration – that can be changed in increments of 18. And it is hard to use. In the attempt to color the hair in the image I had half of it covered with the hair color.

A good tool that works fine is the Auto Finish used for filling up the unintentional gaps within the colored area.The interface of the program deserves a few words. The upper panel of Black Magic window is taken with file operations – load and save, scan, finish, etc.

Right under this one is the tools panel: Smart Paint-brush, Eraser, Select Paint, and Magic Touch Paint all come here. To the right of the tools icons appear the current tool parameters. Tuning and effects controls are only accessible for the professional edition users.
Each tool parameters show on the same panel when the tool is chosen. Apart from that brush presets are found on a separate palette on the right.

As for the colors, that are the most difficult issue when trying to color a black and white photo and make it convincingly natural, Black Magic has a color palette. The set includes color presets for skin, hair, and make up for portraits and earth, sea, sky etc. for nature scenes.

What I found most inconvenient in the program is the work of the zoom tool. Initially the image opens up in 100% scale (it’s not a trial) and if you want to make it bigger or smaller you should set the scale in the prescribed field and press the Zoom button. Only then the image will open in a separate window.

Black Magic also has only one Undo step (only working on pressing a button also).

The resulted images can be saved in JPEG and BMP format.

You can buy Black Magic at http://www.blackmagic-color.com/ in one of the three editions: Home $39, Business $99, and Professional $139.

The trial (demo) version lets us try full functionality (Professional edition).

Specific program versions are enabled based on the license key you purchase. You can compare features amongst different BlackMagic Editions at their web-site.