Realistically colorized historical photos | Hacker News Reader

Realistically colorized historical photos

twentytwowords.com

30 pointsbrendanf8 comments

I love seeing old photos with the color they deserve. It's so easy to look at an old photo and it just feels like a still from an old movie; no emotional attachment to the events depicted.

Coloring the photo brings it to LIFE, and you can relate to it. Or maybe I'm just weird.

You aren't weird. To me, black and white version = "an illustration", colored version = "holy shit, these things actually existed!".

These photos are beautiful.

I have question though: How does a recovery artist estimate and arrive at colors of things, clothes and other objects from a black and white picture? Are these simply imagination and guesswork, or there is some sort of technique/algorithm to get to say the exact shade of blue on Albert Einstein's shorts in the Long Island, 1939 picture?

Basically, no. You'd have to use references and do research to find out what the likely color of every object in the scene is.

If you know what type of black and white film was used and how it was developed, you might be able to eliminate some colors that would have appeared much darker or much lighter. If you had several black and white pictures from the same occasion shot with different film, you might be able to start to triangulate the possible colors of different objects based on how they appear differently in the different images.

But I really don't think that's how most of these are done, it's probably more about creativity and getting something that looks realistic.

Wow, these are really good. I made a website to help colorize photos since I don't have photoshop. It's http://www.colorizephoto.com if you want to try yourself.

Dude, thanks for posting this. My uncle just gave me some black and whites of my dad and I know he is going to flip to see them in color. Just never thought about it before I saw this, cool.

A sure way to kill several hours coloring old family pics :)

The artists listed in the webpage are also active redditors (in what else? /r/colorizedhistory). This set of photos were recently posted in a pretty high trending /r/pics post. The top comments and responses have a bunch of extra information about the process.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q34jl/colorized_histo...

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