December 2006 -- With the release of AKVIS Coloriage V.4.0. for Mac and Win, AKVIS LLC presents the cutting edge technology for automatic B&W photo colorization. The newest version offers yet more flexibility in manipulation of colors on your photo. Now it is possible to change not only the color of the object but its brightness as well; it allows colorizing B&W photos in the colors you wish regardless of the original brightness of the photo.

To add color to black and white photos or recolor areas on a photo with AKVIS Coloriage is as easy as handling a coloring book. In fact, "coloriage" means a coloring book in French.

The colorizing technique is easy: you take the Pencil tool, select a color and draw a rough outline within the area to be colorized; the program recognizes the borders and paints in the new color keeping the tone transitions. No layers manipulation, no manual painting!

However, earlier it was not possible to color light areas with dark colors and vice versa -- for instance, to recolor a white dress into vermilion. The reason is that the program adjusts new colors to the brightness range of the picture to make them look natural.

By request of our users we added the possibility to change not only the color of the object, but its brightness as well. By default the program works as before, but now you can activate the "Preview Brightness" Mode and see how the chosen colors will look on the colorized photo and change their brightness if you wish.

The list of the tool's uses is practically endless. Home users can apply it to colorize old B&W photos from the family archives, for example, to make a present to the grandma by adding color to her early days' photos. Professional designers can use AKVIS Coloriage to try different color schemes for interior and exterior design. Anime and manga enthusiasts can apply it to add color to hand sketch drawings and comics.

The software does not only colorize B&W photos, the available Keep-Color tool makes it possible to replace colors only in defined areas of the picture. Thus, you can recolor clothes on your color photo or change the color of the hair, eyes, etc on a portrait. Selective desaturation and selective colorization of a color photo is made easy. Examples are available at: http://akvis.com/en/coloriage/examples-add-color.php

The new version has a streamlined interface; the hot-key R to start the automatic colorization process has been added. Now there is the possibility to change the brush size for main tools (Pencil, Keep-Color Pencil and Eraser) independently of one another. Read more about changes: http://akvis.com/en/company/news.php

Operating as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Corel Photo-Paint, Paint Shop pro, Bodypaint,etc AKVIS Coloriage requires no complicated techniques or special knowledge to achieve beautiful results.

AKVIS LLC offers a 10-day fully-functional trial of AKVIS Coloriage. Registration costs USD $97.00 for a home license and USD $246.00 for a business license. Home users can enjoy the full line of AKVIS digital imaging processing software in the AKVIS Alchemy bundle (Coloriage, Retoucher, Chameleon, Stamp, Enhancer, Sketch, Decorator and Noise Buster) for USD $285.00, a savings of $261 over purchasing each separately. These details are available at http://akvis.com/en/discounts.php