AKVIS Coloriage 7: Breath Life Into Old Memories With Color

Old albums of black-and-white photos will shine with all their original colors, helping users relive lost memories and warm the hearts of their family and friends. With automated operation and class-leading usability, even inexperienced users can achieve genuinely realistic results.

Version 7.0 introduces a new mode for the Pencil tool, Multicolor mode, as well as other improvements. AKVIS Coloriage is available for Windows and Mac as a Photoshop plug-in and a stand-alone edition.

About AKVIS Coloriage

Using AKVIS Coloriage to colorize a black-and-white photo is as easy as handling a coloring book. In fact, “coloriage” means a coloring book in French. http://akvis.com/en/coloriage/index.php

Simply grab the pencil, select a color from the palette, draw a rough outline within the area to be colorized and Coloriage will do the rest. The program recognizes the borders and paints in the new color automatically, keeping the original tone transitions and enhancing them with colors. Using Coloriage requires no manipulation with layers and no manual painting whatsoever. Coloriage analyzes the original shades of grey on the black-and-white picture to produce a shiny new picture with genuine colors and natural tones.

With AKVIS Coloriage, a perfect gift for a loved one is just a few clicks away. Adding color to their memories can become an exciting gift for the older folks. For example, one user, Robert, used Coloriage to make the perfect Mother’s Day Gift: http://akvis.com/en/coloriage-tutorial/mother-day-gift.php

Version 7.0 includes a new mode for the Pencil tool, Multicolor mode, as well as the Multicolor palette in the Settings Panel to manage this mode. In this mode it is possible to draw several colors at once. It is helpful for complex patterns and objects with clear boundaries, where many areas would have to be marked by the pencil, such as tree branches against a sky, a bush with many flowers, or the buttons on a shirt. This new mode is available for advanced licenses (Deluxe, Business).

Version 7.0 also offers an improved interface design, improved compatibility with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), support for 64 bit to the plug-in version (compatibility with Adobe Photoshop CS4 64 bit), compatibility with Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, a new installation program for Windows, an improved print dialog box (it’s now possible to select a printer and its resolution), and an update to the program’s documentation.

The program is popular among professionals and amateurs alike. Here is an extract of a user’s testimonial:
“The greatest software of this kind ! I have a lot of old B&W pictures taken with my first 35-mm camera back in the sixties that I like to colorize, because the pictures seem to come alive. I used to colorize ..using several layers (one for each color) and it worked fine, but it took a lot of time and was tiresome to paint the colors inside the different areas of the photo. It could take hours to colorize a picture. Until I tried AKVIS Coloriage. The program is so smart that you only have to mark inside an area (i.e. face or clothes) the color you want, and in some mysterious way AKVIS Coloriage manages to fill it with the specified color exact to the area-border. It’s like PURE MAGIC, and colorizing a whole picture only takes a few minutes with a little practice.” (Hakan Elfving, Finnland)

AKVIS Coloriage is available for both Mac and Windows platforms, and comes packaged as a Photoshop plug-in or as a stand-alone application. A fully featured 10-day trial of AKVIS Coloriage is available for free from the company Web site. The product costs from $97 to $246 depending on the license type. Registered users can upgrade to Version 7.0 for free.