Niki Lauda — Sunday 28th March 1976 Long Beach
Another go at colouring a black and white photo. The full colour image above is only 75% the size of the full colouring I did due to Tumblr's image size limit.
Some explanation to my process below.
From what I learned with the previous image, I did a lot more manual editing on this one to hammer out more of the small details. The days of colouring it took just to get the overall picture, aside:
Had to desaturate his hair and skin from my original colouring. Niki's a lot more ash-brown than first assumed. He's also a pale lil' rat with some notable five-o'clock shadow and some minor pockmarking.
The sunglasses also ended up being further desaturated because I think an aspect of the time's colour photography made the lenses appear much more orange than they were in reality.
Four different very shades of red I had to keep track of the palette for, please save me.
Manually went back and desaturated/detailed the shading on the fireproof and jacket's stitching, and the black of the inner-jacket.
Manually detailed his skin more where some shadow and flush was not captured in the original black and white, or was lost when coloured. Skin is the hardest part to capture in colouring, so please tell me how I did!
Manually painted in all his flyaway hairs and the temple and sideburn area.
Manually placed back in a lot of lost shadow throughout pretty much the whole thing.
Manually fixed some photo degradation and other photo issues, and ran it through Topaz to denoise the image to make it easier to detail the colours in.
Added a very minor warm lightening tint since the day was so bright. It also adds colour continuity, which helps it look more natural.
All of Niki is coloured fully accurately to the times and to real life. Only the background (not including the road and concrete barrier) has been coloured with some amount of creative liberty, though it still matches the colour of the area from other photos.
Please tell me what you think, and if you know any photos that might look really nicely coloured. Who knows, maybe I'll take coms for it.
Tag wrangling is, on the whole, a fluid process. It's meant to be, because the way language is used and the way tags are used change over time. We're the first to admit that we don’t always get it right, and that we do sometimes make mistakes despite our best intentions. This is why wrangling decisions are not set in stone and are reevaluated periodically as circumstances change or as new information becomes available.
In light of the impact that removing the Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms metatag has had, we have put that metatag back in place.
When it comes to fandom metatags and fandom trees, there is no 'one size fits all' approach that works for all fandoms. Consequently, we have placed a hold on all structural changes to fandom metatags, All Media Types fandoms (commonly called AMTs), and fandom trees while wranglers discuss the need for additional guidelines and adjustments to our approach regarding these tags going forward.
This hold will remain in place until tag wranglers have had ample time to fully reevaluate our fandom wrangling guidelines with the aim of making it easier for Archive users to find the content they’re looking for and filter out the content they aren’t. This guideline reevaluation process is something we are actively working on, but it will likely take some time to complete. We will update again once these fandom guideline discussions have come to a close.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
(From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.)
Niki Lauda — Sunday 28th March 1976 Long Beach - Preparing Shortly Before the Race, Niki Would Finish P2
It took a long while, but finally I finished colouring this black-and-white photo.
Everything has been colour matched to be as accurate as possible to how it was in real life, guided by other colour photos of the event. Though, some exceptions had to be taken, such as the hair and clothing colour of background people.
"Why can't the freaks on AO3 just go and make a site for all the gross stuff and leave AO3 alone."
Because AO3 is that site. Because AO3 was that site long before you decided AO3 was better than the sites you bullied us off of before, and I can promise you if someone somehow comes up with a fanfic site you like better specifically for the 'gross stuff' you'll try to bully us off that too so you can benefit from it.
AO3's specific core purpose is to preserve fanfiction, yes, but it was also instigated as a host site for the fanfiction that kept getting yeeted off other platforms like Wattpad. Its designed to preserve all fanfiction, not just the fanfiction you, personally, think is 'allowed' to be written.
AO3 is the site for all the gross stuff the freaks make. We've been there just as long as you. We've been funding it just as long as you have. AO3 has specifically said you have a place here. The timeline was literally:
Wattpad/FF.net/LiveJournal purge fanfics > AO3 is born > The people who's fics got purged moved over to AO3 > AO3 gains popularity as the best functioning site > The people who pushed for the fics to be purged off Wattpad move to AO3 > The same people try to push for AO3 to purge fics.
AO3's source coding is open-access. You go make a polished, strict, rigid site where nothing 'icky' is allowed. You go make a site where you can control what is hosted. We already have our space.
Whenever I need my blood pressure raising, I go to the skin and accent problems forum thread and read the rejection reasons
Pixel art I did for my Niki Lauda fan-dragon. Depicted in his pre-1976 unscarred state.
My Twitter has been officially WIPED. It was good while it lasted, now for more time on Tumblr and Bluesky.
Yeah I'm hm uh huh
I originally was trying to decipher the design of his chest but then got distracted lol
He/Him – Axo • Gabe • Killie – Adult 𝑇𝑖𝑝 – 𝐾𝑜-𝑓𝑖 – 𝐶𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑑 – 𝐴𝑂3 – 𝐷𝐴 – 𝐵𝑆𝑘𝑦 – 𝐺𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑢𝑏 – 𝐹𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑅𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝐹𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑎 1 𝑆𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑔 – 𝑃𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐 𝑆𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑔
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