5 ms·

Are colorized photos rewriting history?

21 points by endymi0n 11y ago

werber 11y ago
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?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- geon 11y ago
  Some of these are pretty well done: http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-photos-colorized-using-photoshop/ http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-pho...
  - werber 11y ago
    Eh, the Saigon Execution photo looks pretty convincing. The rest look great, but colorized.
jameshart 11y ago
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.
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  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?
  - jameshart 11y ago
    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.
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    > 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?
ClintEhrlich 11y ago
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.
kordless 11y ago
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.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  How would you even begin to do that?
  - kordless 11y ago
    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?
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Can you tell by them?
code_sterling 11y ago
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.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > 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.
dghughes 11y ago
>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?

21 points by endymi0n 11y ago

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?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
geon 11y ago
Some of these are pretty well done: http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-photos-colorized-using-photoshop/ http://www.bitrebels.com/design/19-legendary-black-white-pho...
- werber 11y ago
  Eh, the Saigon Execution photo looks pretty convincing. The rest look great, but colorized.

jameshart 11y ago

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.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
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?
- jameshart 11y ago
  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.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > 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?

ClintEhrlich 11y ago

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.

kordless 11y ago

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.

StavrosK 11y ago
How would you even begin to do that?
- kordless 11y ago
  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?
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Can you tell by them?

code_sterling 11y ago

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.

JadeNB 11y ago
> 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.

dghughes 11y ago

>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?