My Grandfather

Fascinating.

The black and white picture was probably hi- jacked with a DIY colour kit in the early 1950's.

There was a product on sale which was water coloured based where you could "paint by numbers style" and change a b/w photograph to a coloured one. Certainly no where near full colour but better than black an white.

If in fact the photo is dated "during" war time vs. not too many years earlier, it may be that this is an early photo using Kodachrome. The first modern ('integrated tri-pack') color film, Kodachrome, was introduced in 1935 based on three colored emulsions. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on technology developed for Agfacolor (as 'Agfacolor Neue') in 1936. (In this newer technology the colour-couplers are already within the emulsion layers, rather than having to be carefully diffused in during development.)

Of the 2 basic colour systems, one being Additive, and the other being subtractive. It is likely to be that of the later. Subtractive uses colors Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, which are subtracted from white light. Several print methods were devised using this technique during the 1930s (see eg Coe, ref 1), for printing from 'separation negatives'. Kodachrome was the first commercially-available 'integrated tri-pack' film of this type.



note: some of this comment was "borrowed" from the wiki.

Yeah, it looks hand coloured. It was very fashionable but now is considered a bit of an obscure art form. Visit http://www.bkpix.com for a good overview. You can find a ton of products for sale, on Amazon, for starting to hand colour yourself and there are classes that run at Seattle Community Col. if you're super interested ;-) Although, photoshop and layering makes it way easier.