Recoloring Historical Photos

A project for RFE/RL Tatar Baskir RU service

The service had some historical photos and wanted to use them in one of their stories. The photos were obviously quite old, but they wanted to somehow use them to show how these places could look like in real life. So we came up with the idea of coloring them which completely brought these old photographs to life. Just to give an idea, cleaning and coloring one black and white photo can take up to 8 hours of work! The process is very delicate and complex.

Photo Collage

A project for RFE/RL Kazakh and Kazakh RU service

Sometimes there there can be a situation when you have a lot of cool pictures to use for a project, but many of them, especially historical ones, may be of poor quality. What if you need to use these low resolution photos for the main image of an article/project or for social networks?.. In cases like these, a photo collage is the best idea.

This exact collage was created for the Kazakh and Kazakh RU articles (see here), which received an award in January 2019. The only thing that is needed for the photo-collage is actually a bunch of photos and patience to tastefully put them together :)

Photos to Illustrations

This project was not published

The author of this project, which is a story about doping, wanted to illustrate the story by transforming real pictures into illustrations which look like real watercolor sketches made by hand.

Watch the video showing the process of creating the illustrations from the photographs:

Working With Bad Quality Photos

An example of photo editing for RFE/RL Moldovan service's project

Sometimes (actually very frequently) there is a picture that a client wants to use in their project, but it could be of bad quality, photographed with the mobile phone, or just old and damaged. Our opinion: almost every photograph can be improved, this is just a matter of time and skills. Sometimes a retouched photograph can become a piece of art by itself.

Watch the video showing the process of improving the photograph:

This and other retouched photographs were used in 'The Emigration Generation' web project by RFE/RL Moldovan service, also designed and developed by us. See the project here.

Holocaust Project Image

Main image for the 'Holocaust' project by RFE/RL South Slavic service

This project was a big challenge for our team. The customer asked to create a custom image which would include the concentration camp, barbed wire and nine jewish stars badges 'hanging' from this wire. Each star should represent a chapter of the story, so you can click on it and get to this chapter. In the end, the image was created from a photo of the real concentration camp with some additional objects, weather effects, additional light sources and a lot of color correction.

Watch the video showing the process of creating the image:

In the final version of the image, used on the web, we added custom animation for dramatic effect, since the project tells about truly tragic events in the history od mankind. See more about the creating of the web site itself here.

Mari Prayers Project Image

Main image for the Mari Prayers project by RFE/RL Tatar Bashkir RU service

The service has prepared fantastic pictures for their project about Mari people, but one of them was just stunning -- a fantastic portrait of an old Mari man. We retouched this image so it would look even more interesting and made it the main image for the whole project. Finally, creating the website, we added a 'moving' snow effect so it would look even more dramatic and visually appealing. See the story behind creating the site itself here.

In the slider above, you can watch some of the steps of creating the image:

Living in the Radioactive Zone Project Image

Main image for the project by RFE/RL Tatar Bashkir RU service

This is unbelievable, but this photo with colorful coffins is the real one. It looks so unreal and catchy, that we decided to use it as a main image for the project about the residents of a village in the radioactive zone, and retouched it to make it even more effective and attention-catching.

BTW, it's important to remember that photos like this can be used only as illustrative ones, never 'documentary'. Here you can see the process of working with the image:

Bashkir Women Project Image

Main image for the project by RFE/RL Tatar Bashkir RU service

One of our favorites, this project which the tells story of the unbelievable Bashkir women, contained a lot of very beautiful photos. We chose one of them and just slightly edited it to look more illustrative and bright so it would work perfectly as a main image for the project. The photo was absolutely fantastic by itself so we worked mostly with the color correction here and you can see that effect of the photo is now totally different.

Here you can see the process of working with the image:

It was really nice that the service prepared for us these pictures in high resolution, contrast and in focus. The result of the retouch would be way better if provided photographs are professional ones.