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As a professional photo editor and historian, colorized photos really agitate me. I'm all for the creation of new ways to get people to engage with historical p

by vwcx 9y ago

As a professional photo editor and historian, colorized photos really agitate me. I'm all for the creation of new ways to get people to engage with historical primary documentation, but the nuance that these colorizations are interpretations gets lost immediately. Do an image search for "D-Day in color" and try to tell me which results are original color negatives and which are colorizations made by teenagers. I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny.

nerdponx 9y ago
I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. I always assumed that if you tried to use "full color" it would look weird, since the photos themselves usually are quite faded and grainy.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  More than that, it would look weird because restoring the color to a photo in a way that looks plausibly photorealistic is really hard. If you make something more stylized, the viewer doesn’t have as much reference to compare and realize that there’s something wrong. To the grandparent: people have been trying to colorize black and white photos since the 1840s; complaining isn’t going to stop them now, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs
  - vwcx 9y ago
    To the grandparent: people have been trying to colorize black and white photos since the 1840s True. But there was also tons of skepticism in the medium throughout the mid- to late 1800s. Oliver Wendell Holmes' writing on veracity of photography is a neat reminder that it took the public decades to come to terms that the photographic process was a somewhat-veritable facsimile of "real" life.
justinator 9y ago
I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. Well, as a professional photo editor, you know that if the original b+w photo captures an image with say, a 50% grey value, you don't know if the original color was bright red, or closer to that 50% gray. Bright red has a much higher chroma value, but chroma isn't recorded in a b+w photo - color saturation is lost. Easily demonstrated by making an image in your favorite image editing program that's just straight up red, then changing the image mode to grayscale, then asking someone else entirely to guess the original color. That, and I think the style is to mimic hand tinting photographs, where you would paint right on a b+w photo. The colors would look "faded" because whatever was used to tint the photograph needed to have a transparent medium, for the information of the photograph itself to shine through. That, and there's just so many colors you could use when hand-tinting. Back to our 50% gray. What if that was... bright yellow? You can't tint "bright yellow" onto a 50% gray area of a photograph. Yellow is highly transparent, and the grey would be too powerful to let its chroma value shine through.
- vwcx 9y ago
  Thanks. That's a perspective that didn't really dawn on me until your comment. I guess in some ways, the muted colors could be seen less as the colorist's stylistic choice than an appeal to "safe" representation of chroma values that don't offer information about vibrancy.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    I don’t think that’s quite it (i.e. that modern amateur photo colorists are intentionally aiming for a 19th century tinted photo style). The bigger problem is that real images have varying chroma and hue within single shapes, but actually mimicking that when coloring a black and white photograph takes a huge amount of skill, attention to detail, and work. You have to think about what the lighting was like, what material it was striking and at what angle, what lens filters the photographer might have used to capture the image, etc. and then you have to go in and painstakingly paint all of those fine gradations and textures in. It’s especially difficult to do a convincing job with skin, but most materials are hard to color convincingly. It’s much easier to apply color to whole shapes as a blob, but this looks terrible (very obviously wrong) when you make the colors very strong. If you want to try for yourself, get a Photoshop expert friend to find some color photographs (without showing them to you first) and convert them to black and white, applying whatever kind of intermediate processing he/she desires as long as it results in a roughly photorealistic looking black and white image. Then you try to photorealistically colorize the photo, spending as much time and effort on it as you want. When you have something you are satisfied with, compare to the colored original. It’s very likely that the colorized version will look pretty bad in comparison, even if it looked vaguely okay on its own.
WalterBright 9y ago
I like colorized historical photos. It brings them to life in a remarkable way. I'd like to see the old B+W movies colorized (the Ted Turner ones don't count, as they were done very poorly). Sure, the colors will never be exact, because we don't know what the original colors were. But that doesn't matter in any material way.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Agreed. Interpretation or not, I don't see a problem as long as the colorization is not outright inaccurate. Also consider that for a long time people didn't even have photos and only had illustrations and written descriptions to go on.
- aglavine 9y ago
  The 'exact' concept is wrong. Any picture depends on lighting, camera used, filters, lens, etc. I don't mind colorized photos. Yet for some of them that were made thinking in a b/w result (For example, the 'With The Beatles' album cover) colorizing means the lost of those stylistic choices.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Having worked on movies shot on video, color film, and B+W film, the lighting and design choices are very different. Colorizing BW movies makes some sense for historical footage where that was the only available option, like newsreels or very ear;y films, but for anything with aesthetic choices involved (German expressionism onwards), it's no more appropriate than trying to figure out what Picasso's models 'really' looked like. Artists are not that concerned with fidelity, but with pushing the salient characteristics of their available or chosen medium in support of a particular artistic vision. We are not merely recording; as soon as there is more than one option available (whether that's paint on canvas or different kinds of film stock) we start playing with the possibilities. When you begin colorizing you risk compromising that.
WalterBright 9y ago
> I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Many movies set in the past, or that have flashbacks to the past, will often mute the colors. Most modern movies muck around with the colors in post production, too. The worst is when they go for the blue/orange palette.
- olalonde 9y ago
  > The worst is when they go for the blue/orange palette. http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...
dahart 9y ago
> the nuance that these colorizations are interpretations gets lost immediately. True for all AI; neural networks are doing amazing things, but the output is a synthesis, it's a complex interpolation of it's training inputs that may seem "good" or reliable, but it is never to be taken as truth or fact, and it can be arbitrarily wrong with unbounded errors. > I'm also a little confused as to why colorization always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. This isn't a human logic problem. Normally colorizations don't affect tonality and grain much, they are putting color splashes on top of a B/W image. This is true of hand-painted colorization, as well as the digital colorization here. You can't get rid of grain or adjust tone by adding color. One can adjust tone and grain, but then you're doing more than colorizing, and going even further down the road of "interpretation" you're concerned about. In this particular case, the author did mention "A more diverse dataset makes the pictures brownish". Brown is the average color in natural photos, so minimizing error tends to make things browish. That is separate from leaving faded tone & grain in tact, but it's a second reason why AI based colorization will tend toward muted color.
mc32 9y ago
I think there was a cable TV channel a longtime ago which might have been a Turner property --they would get rights to some classic B&W movie and colorize it --I'm sure the tech used back then was somewhat primitive but the results were horrific --but of course "Color!"
- robotosan 9y ago
  I remember watching some of them! Turner Classic Movies was the culprit and they were dreadful. I suppose the technique has evolved exponentially since then.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Aw, man, yep, that was it. I vaguely recall the awful tinge of their movies. Looks like many actors, directors who were in some of the victimized movies were none too happy about the colorization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKtRvBZx28c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKtRvBZx28c
contingencies 9y ago
As a professional photo editor and historian, colorized photos really agitate me. As a photographer, collector and enthusiast of vintage prints and photos and amateur historian, I deeply appreciate the aesthetic of colorized photos and understand the motivation to reproduce and master it. There is more to art than truth. The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival. - L'Intemporel (Third volume of 'The Metamorphosis of the Gods'), André Malraux (1957)
ricardobeat 9y ago
Another thing that is rarely mentioned, is that it’s very common to use color filters in B&W photography to tune the contrast. That means the luminance values can be completely different from what they actually were, and skew the color choices. On the other hand, this might be something that a good ML algorithm can detect and compensate for.

by vwcx 9y ago

nerdponx 9y ago

I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. I always assumed that if you tried to use "full color" it would look weird, since the photos themselves usually are quite faded and grainy.

jacobolus 9y ago
More than that, it would look weird because restoring the color to a photo in a way that looks plausibly photorealistic is really hard. If you make something more stylized, the viewer doesn’t have as much reference to compare and realize that there’s something wrong. To the grandparent: people have been trying to colorize black and white photos since the 1840s; complaining isn’t going to stop them now, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs
- vwcx 9y ago
  To the grandparent: people have been trying to colorize black and white photos since the 1840s True. But there was also tons of skepticism in the medium throughout the mid- to late 1800s. Oliver Wendell Holmes' writing on veracity of photography is a neat reminder that it took the public decades to come to terms that the photographic process was a somewhat-veritable facsimile of "real" life.

justinator 9y ago

I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. Well, as a professional photo editor, you know that if the original b+w photo captures an image with say, a 50% grey value, you don't know if the original color was bright red, or closer to that 50% gray. Bright red has a much higher chroma value, but chroma isn't recorded in a b+w photo - color saturation is lost. Easily demonstrated by making an image in your favorite image editing program that's just straight up red, then changing the image mode to grayscale, then asking someone else entirely to guess the original color. That, and I think the style is to mimic hand tinting photographs, where you would paint right on a b+w photo. The colors would look "faded" because whatever was used to tint the photograph needed to have a transparent medium, for the information of the photograph itself to shine through. That, and there's just so many colors you could use when hand-tinting. Back to our 50% gray. What if that was... bright yellow? You can't tint "bright yellow" onto a 50% gray area of a photograph. Yellow is highly transparent, and the grey would be too powerful to let its chroma value shine through.

vwcx 9y ago
Thanks. That's a perspective that didn't really dawn on me until your comment. I guess in some ways, the muted colors could be seen less as the colorist's stylistic choice than an appeal to "safe" representation of chroma values that don't offer information about vibrancy.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  I don’t think that’s quite it (i.e. that modern amateur photo colorists are intentionally aiming for a 19th century tinted photo style). The bigger problem is that real images have varying chroma and hue within single shapes, but actually mimicking that when coloring a black and white photograph takes a huge amount of skill, attention to detail, and work. You have to think about what the lighting was like, what material it was striking and at what angle, what lens filters the photographer might have used to capture the image, etc. and then you have to go in and painstakingly paint all of those fine gradations and textures in. It’s especially difficult to do a convincing job with skin, but most materials are hard to color convincingly. It’s much easier to apply color to whole shapes as a blob, but this looks terrible (very obviously wrong) when you make the colors very strong. If you want to try for yourself, get a Photoshop expert friend to find some color photographs (without showing them to you first) and convert them to black and white, applying whatever kind of intermediate processing he/she desires as long as it results in a roughly photorealistic looking black and white image. Then you try to photorealistically colorize the photo, spending as much time and effort on it as you want. When you have something you are satisfied with, compare to the colored original. It’s very likely that the colorized version will look pretty bad in comparison, even if it looked vaguely okay on its own.

WalterBright 9y ago

I like colorized historical photos. It brings them to life in a remarkable way. I'd like to see the old B+W movies colorized (the Ted Turner ones don't count, as they were done very poorly). Sure, the colors will never be exact, because we don't know what the original colors were. But that doesn't matter in any material way.

nerdponx 9y ago
Agreed. Interpretation or not, I don't see a problem as long as the colorization is not outright inaccurate. Also consider that for a long time people didn't even have photos and only had illustrations and written descriptions to go on.
aglavine 9y ago
The 'exact' concept is wrong. Any picture depends on lighting, camera used, filters, lens, etc. I don't mind colorized photos. Yet for some of them that were made thinking in a b/w result (For example, the 'With The Beatles' album cover) colorizing means the lost of those stylistic choices.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Having worked on movies shot on video, color film, and B+W film, the lighting and design choices are very different. Colorizing BW movies makes some sense for historical footage where that was the only available option, like newsreels or very ear;y films, but for anything with aesthetic choices involved (German expressionism onwards), it's no more appropriate than trying to figure out what Picasso's models 'really' looked like. Artists are not that concerned with fidelity, but with pushing the salient characteristics of their available or chosen medium in support of a particular artistic vision. We are not merely recording; as soon as there is more than one option available (whether that's paint on canvas or different kinds of film stock) we start playing with the possibilities. When you begin colorizing you risk compromising that.

WalterBright 9y ago

> I'm also a little confused as to why colorizations always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Many movies set in the past, or that have flashbacks to the past, will often mute the colors. Most modern movies muck around with the colors in post production, too. The worst is when they go for the blue/orange palette.

olalonde 9y ago
> The worst is when they go for the blue/orange palette. http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-ho...

dahart 9y ago

> the nuance that these colorizations are interpretations gets lost immediately. True for all AI; neural networks are doing amazing things, but the output is a synthesis, it's a complex interpolation of it's training inputs that may seem "good" or reliable, but it is never to be taken as truth or fact, and it can be arbitrarily wrong with unbounded errors. > I'm also a little confused as to why colorization always aim to restore color to the equivalent of a faded color negative, with muted tonality and grain. Human logic is funny. This isn't a human logic problem. Normally colorizations don't affect tonality and grain much, they are putting color splashes on top of a B/W image. This is true of hand-painted colorization, as well as the digital colorization here. You can't get rid of grain or adjust tone by adding color. One can adjust tone and grain, but then you're doing more than colorizing, and going even further down the road of "interpretation" you're concerned about. In this particular case, the author did mention "A more diverse dataset makes the pictures brownish". Brown is the average color in natural photos, so minimizing error tends to make things browish. That is separate from leaving faded tone & grain in tact, but it's a second reason why AI based colorization will tend toward muted color.

mc32 9y ago

I think there was a cable TV channel a longtime ago which might have been a Turner property --they would get rights to some classic B&W movie and colorize it --I'm sure the tech used back then was somewhat primitive but the results were horrific --but of course "Color!"

robotosan 9y ago
I remember watching some of them! Turner Classic Movies was the culprit and they were dreadful. I suppose the technique has evolved exponentially since then.
- mc32 9y ago
  Aw, man, yep, that was it. I vaguely recall the awful tinge of their movies. Looks like many actors, directors who were in some of the victimized movies were none too happy about the colorization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKtRvBZx28c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKtRvBZx28c

contingencies 9y ago

As a professional photo editor and historian, colorized photos really agitate me. As a photographer, collector and enthusiast of vintage prints and photos and amateur historian, I deeply appreciate the aesthetic of colorized photos and understand the motivation to reproduce and master it. There is more to art than truth. The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival. - L'Intemporel (Third volume of 'The Metamorphosis of the Gods'), André Malraux (1957)

ricardobeat 9y ago

Another thing that is rarely mentioned, is that it’s very common to use color filters in B&W photography to tune the contrast. That means the luminance values can be completely different from what they actually were, and skew the color choices. On the other hand, this might be something that a good ML algorithm can detect and compensate for.