

Realistically colorized historical photos - brendanf
http://twentytwowords.com/2013/11/06/realistically-colorized-historical-photos-make-the-past-seem-incredibly-real-36-pictures/

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donutdan4114
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.

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

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monsterix
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?

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tobr
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.

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nkron
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](http://www.colorizephoto.com) if you want to
try yourself.

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rickdale
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.

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icegreentea
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q34jl/colorized_historical_photos_can_make_the_past/)

