How to colorize and old black and white video? please suggest easy ways :)

Question

1- please tell me more than a way of how to colorize the black and white movie ..!
what is the best way to do that in less time as possible (actually i found it a hard work ).  please tell me there's a way to make it
2- also i want to know if there is a palette of color value numbers . let me make it more understandable
when i applied the color balance effect on an adjustment layer (using AE)  to have a try to color a frame,  i got the RGB values to control by which the color i want. so i found it a little hard to get far a way from the orange , purple , green , pink , red , gray and blue colors via combining the values .. so i am asking if there is a palette that could help me to mix color values and get more colors!!!
3- what programs could do this? i have an idea that after effects could do it but what else?

Answer 1

Here's a step by step and a few other ideas. To add color to a black and white film it is best to use the Color blend mode. AE CC 2014 has very powerful mask tracking which can be used to isolate things like faces and clothing. A bit of hand work may also be required. For some scenes, you'll need to use RotoBrush to isolate the elements you want to colorize. You cannot effectively colorize just by manipulating channels unless you want very subtle colors because black and white images may have exactly the same color channel values for a man's shirt that you want to turn blue, the leaves on a tree that you want to turn green or the car he is driving that you want to turn red. You can, however, create a mask that tracks the car and then add a red layer or fill effect using the color blend mode to turn the gray car red and maintain all of the highlights and shadow values.
Really powerful color correction software has the power to isolate and track areas based on edges (much the same way rotobrush works) so this kind of color correction can be done on the fly but it still requires a separate mask for every color you want to add.