Film colorization
Film colorization is any process that adds color to black-and-white, sepia, or other monochrome moving-picture images. It may be done as a special effect, or to modernize black-and-white films, or to restore color films. Examples date from the early 20th century, but colorization has become common with the advent of digital image processing.
Early techniques
Hand colorization
The first film colorization methods were hand done by individuals. For example, at least 4% of George Méliès's output, including some prints of A Trip to the Moon from 1902 and other major films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies, The Impossible Voyage, and The Barber of Seville were individually hand-colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. Thuillier, a former colorist of glass and celluloid products, directed a studio of two hundred people painting directly on film stock with brushes, in the colors she chose and specified; each worker was assigned a different color in assembly line style, with more than twenty separate colors often used for a single film. On average, Thuillier's lab produced about sixty hand-colored copies of a film A Trip to the Moon, but only one copy is known to exist.