
Are colorized photos rewriting history? - endymi0n
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/are-colorized-photos-rewriting-history-1579276696
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jameshart
Well, the 1985 Steve Jobs pic appears to show platinum-colored Macs, which
weren't introduced until 1987. You can look up exactly what color those macs
were (Pantone 453, if you're interested), yet the artist didn't even do that.
So... yeah, this seems like a great way to introduce misconception and error.

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ClintEhrlich
Perhaps this calls for a stenographical solution within the relevant programs
that identifies the colored images as altered? I suppose it's not practical,
but I feel like the optimal solution would be some way of distinguishing
between the level of accuracy needed for scholarship and for that of informal
web postings.

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?

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jameshart
The only thing the colorizer is adding is color. Where the color is
speculative, you would hope it would be informed by history. Where the color
can be known with certainty, you would hope the artist would abide by that.

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code_sterling
I'm not sure I understand the argument. They people weren't grey scale either.
The photo itself re-writes history, this is just an abstraction to make it
more visually distinctive.

Sure maybe the car was a slight shade of red different, but it certainly
wasn't grey.

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JadeNB
> I'm not sure I understand the argument. They people weren't grey scale
> either. The photo itself re-writes history, this is just an abstraction to
> make it more visually distinctive.

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.

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werber
Is it just me, or do almost all colorizations looks colorized? Anyone have an
example of a picture that fooled them into believing it didn't start life in
black & white?

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geon
Some of these are pretty well done:
[http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-
pho...](http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-photos-
colorized-using-photoshop/)

~~~
werber
Eh, the Saigon Execution photo looks pretty convincing. The rest look great,
but colorized.

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kordless
Given the amount of information analysis we're seeing applied to things like
extracting heartbeats out of videos, I think we're safe in saying that any
colorization or modification of a photo will be detectable, or at least have a
probability assignment to the chances the photo has been manipulated.

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StavrosK
How would you even begin to do that?

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kordless
It starts with the pixels. :)

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?

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StavrosK
Can you tell by them?

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dghughes
>Color images resonate with those of us who grew up during a period when color
photography was the norm—and color was obviously commonplace in 1985!

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?

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ClintEhrlich
The colorization of historical photos is an interesting trend, but I don't
share the author's pensive dread. I certainly didn't see much ground for
concern in his examples.

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.

