Touch of the Orient

Hand-coloring refers to any method of manually adding color to a monochrome photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-coloring is also known as hand painting or overpainting.

Typically, watercolors, oils, crayons or pastels, and other paints or dyes are applied to the image surface using brushes, fingers, cotton swabs or airbrushes. Hand-colored photographs were most popular in the mid- to late-19th century before the invention of color photography and some firms specialized in producing hand-colored photographs.