Are colorized photos rewriting history?
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
There is no reason to allow a zero-sum relationship to emerge between casual browsers and serious researchers. If that is a valid concern (and I don't think it is) then the solution is to accelerate academic efforts to document the web — not to needlessly restrict the popularization of history among the proles.
And, regardless of anything else, I would challenge you to name a single consequence of the miscolored Macs. Why does it matter whether the future knows whether that color was introduced in 1984 or 1987?
Isn't it more important that 200 years ago they still have media that makes people remember Steve Jobs?
Yes, but wouldn't a black-and-white photograph do that as well, and be less deceptive?
Sure maybe the car was a slight shade of red different, but it certainly wasn't grey.
I think the claim is that the viewer intuitively understands that information has been lost in a conversion to greyscale, but does not intuitively understand when looking at a colourised photo that the colours might not be right. That is, the greyscale is regarded as a known-incorrect record of reality, whereas the colourised photo may be regarded improperly as a correct record of reality.
Purely speculation: it would involve modeling the 3D environment in the photo and then changing colors until you get a similar distribution of light (say shadow areas) in each iteration which has some sort of matched probability distribution as the original photo.
With a nearly limitless amount of compute, you can do anything "close enough", which to the point of the article, is a refutation of the claim that people are "rewriting history".
What is "history"? Why is a precise view of it so important?
Not in newspapers. then again the photo itself in the newspaper may have been taken in colour and then converted or maybe it was in B&W to make it easier to print?
The potential certainly exists for the addition of color to have some negative effects, particularly if the process introduces or perpetuates inaccuracies. But there is an inherent limitation to the scope of these anachronisms: even at their worst, they only affect the color of what is shown, so people who are exposed to the images are still consuming historical information that is mostly authentic.
This drawback is trivial compared to the benefits that colorization offers. It is a great tool for popularizing history, both because it makes historical photos more accessible to lay audiences, and because the process itself is becoming a popular hobby. Better to have the next generation mix up a few colors than forget events altogether.
Even someone like me with a lifelong passion for history can benefit from viewing colorized photos, because they allow a deeper level of immersion in the past. Try as we might to remember that our ancestors saw the same colors we do today, black-and-white photos subliminally distance us from a past that looks alien and unfamiliar. Colorization often transforms a mundane depiction of the past into a gripping portrait of what could be the present.
It allows us to hoary intellectualism for the visceral horror of war, thrill of lust, and opulence of royalty. Even when the colors themselves are wrong, they may provide a more authentic replication of the visceral reactions experienced by the photographer's living, breathing contemporaries.
Of course, there is still a place for black-and-white photography. Its appeal will endure among the intelligent, because the elimination of extraneous color differences allows the auteur to reduce a scene to only its essential components. But we delude ourselves if we think that many of the people viewing colorized photographs would otherwise be perusing the images black-and-white source material.
The solution is normally to present the two versions of the images together. This decreases the risk that viewers will be misled, because it shows them which aspects of the photograph have been modified.
The article asked what it will mean if Norman Seeff's original black-and-white photograph of Steve Jobs is surpassed in popularity by its colorized offspring. To history, it would mean nothing, not only because the pigmentation of Jobs' sweater is of no interest, but because scholars will rely on the originals whenever possible. However, it would reveal a lot about the image's aesthetic appeal — i.e., that it became popular in spite of, not because of, its restricted palate.
This is another benefit of colorization: It opens up new vistas for art criticism. There is something significant about the fact that many black-and-white images are enhanced by the process, while others seem to lose their je ne ce quoi. Is this a real phenomenon? A cultural artifact/ A figment of our imagination?
The only way to find out is to keep colorizing.