5 ms·

It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. People back then didn't experience reality in BW either. I know it's silly, but I was kinda surprised the fir

by pier25 6y ago

It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. People back then didn't experience reality in BW either. I know it's silly, but I was kinda surprised the first time I saw early color photographies. I was so used to the BW or sepia old images that it had never occurred to me that, you know, people of that time did live in color too just like we do. See these images from the early 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rgb-compose-Alim_Khan.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rgb-compose-Alim_Khan.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography#/media/File:Prokudin-Gorskii-12.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography#/media/File:...

tommica 6y ago
That is so true, I've also gotten similar kind of realization with being happy - so serious in most pictures, as was the style then, but then a picture of a farm couple laughing reminds me that they infact were living their lives just like we are
- fossuser 6y ago
  The seriousness in pictures was a cultural artifact of the time, I think partly because people treated photos like getting portraits? There's this photo from 1901 which seems really modern: https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/smiling-chinese-man-eating-rice-1901-1-5c98d17755668__700.jpg https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/0... The speculation is that he didn't know about the culture of looking serious.
  - btilly 6y ago
    It was also an artifact of the technology. Cameras tended to have long exposure times. If you have to hold a position for 30 seconds, it is easier to do so with a serious face than a laughing one.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    The other aspect is the early photos required long exposures. It is hard to maintain a smile or stand still long enough, so a neutral face was requested by the photographer. Daguerreotype's required upwards of 20 minutes!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dwighttk 6y ago
obligatory Calvin and Hobbes: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  I love Calvin and Hobbes. The inanities combined with weird "truths" still kind of speak of how perception matters. And yes, I think historians are kind of thinking of this backwards (in the same way Calvin's father explains this to Calvin).
adventured 6y ago
The colorized Peter Jackson WW1 documentary is the most dramatic example of how useful this is, of any that I've seen. I think making the past seem more real and relevant is useful in helping people to learn from and understand our history by making it more relatable. Those were real, warm blooded people with hopes and dreams, dying by the tens of thousands in 1916. The more you humanize history (rather than being a rote, soulless text or object in a book), the better. Which takes nothing away from how beautiful B&W can be, there's no reason we can't preserve that history simultaneously.
- lttlrck 6y ago
  They way they held back on the transition from black and white to color until a good 20-30 minutes into the movie made it all the more breathtaking when it happened. At that point you were already absorbed in the black and white footage, it was magical.
beebmam 6y ago
Every time we apply an interpretation technique, we're losing information. It is strictly an increase in entropy. That's not good from a historical perspective
- mcv 6y ago
  We're not actually losing anything here, though. The original still exists.
- eru 6y ago
  That would be true, if people were perfect absorbers of information. But they aren't. So, leaving aside that the original is still, an interpretation technique might strictly lose a bit here or there, but it might actually result in many more bits delivered to the end user.
godelski 6y ago
> it had never occurred to me that, you know, people of that time did live in color too just like we do. I think this is an important (and common) note. Especially when you look at the time-frame of most of the images and video we have being only ~100 years old (20th century). That sounds like a long time ago. B&W photos make that feel like a long time ago. But in reality, that's when your great grandma was born. That's not many people ago. In one respect it is accurate to say 100 years was a long time ago but saying it wasn't is also equally valid. While tech has changed a lot in that time, it is hard to say people have. By upscaling and colorizing these photos it makes it feel much more recent. If we accept that long and not long ago are equally valid takes, then we'd have to accept that both these ways of presenting historical information (a picture is information) are valid too. But they do tell different stories, and it is important to remember that.
derefr 6y ago
Rather than thinking of colorization (or upscaling) as a thing we do "to" a photo to alter it further from a primary-source ground-truth; another perspective (the one shared by art conservators, I think) would be to think of a photo that was taken in a too-low resolution, or in B&W (when that wasn't intentionally done for artistic effect) as a kind of "damage" done to the photo right at the time of its creation, where that "damage" moved the photo further away from achieving the photo-taker's intent (which usually, with most photos, is to losslessly convey the experience of looking at the subject of the photo, as it looked at the place and time the photo was taken.) Colorization, upscaling, etc. could then be thought of as repairing this damage, bringing the photo closer to being a lossless communication of the information it was created to convey. (By analogy: imagine a technology that could analyze an illustration drawn by someone whose hand was shaking due to Parkinsonism, and then compute what the illustration would have looked like if the artist's hand hadn't been shaking. That would also be a kind of "repair.")
- eru 6y ago
  Compare also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
- smogcutter 6y ago
  > which usually, with most photos, is to losslessly convey the experience of looking at the subject of the photo, as it looked at the place and time the photo was taken. That’s quite a strong statement, and one that I think many photographers would disagree with. Snapshots aside, this severely understates the artistic choices a photographer makes. For one thing, black & white and color read very differently to the eye, and offer different palettes for composition (although it’s not about photography, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” has a great exploration of the effects of b&w vs color and is a fun read to boot). Basically all b&w cinematography also gives the lie to this statement: it’s impossible to honestly argue that a colorization of, say, the stark expressionism of Night of the Hunter would be a repaired version. The extent to which a photo is, or is even intended to be, a representation of “primary-source ground truth” is something we’ve been arguing since, like, Edward Said. I’m not saying images should never be colorized, or upscaled, or whatever. Obviously that’s not the case. Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, as another poster mentioned, is a triumph. But it’s too complicated a conversation to dismiss by declaring, in one sentence like Moses coming down from the mountain, that the purpose of photography is the “lossless communication of information”.
nevster 6y ago
It's funny. Conversely, I've seen instances where people purposely post things in B&W to make it feel old. I'm 49 and my old school has an alumni facebook group where they occasionally post old photos. Sometimes they're from my era (ie high school in the 80's) and they post them in black and white. When I first see them, I think they're from the 40's or 50's. Then I realise they're from the 80's and I feel kind of annoyed!
- tssva 6y ago
  Depending on where the photos came from the source material may have been B&W. For example many year books in the 80's were still printed in B&W because it was significantly cheaper.
  - nevster 6y ago
    Definitely possible.
redwall_hp 6y ago
Colorization can also help humanize the past and make it seem less distant. I recall watching a documentary on WWI (World War I in Color) that was all colorized footage. It just makes everything seem more real.
abiogenesis 6y ago
> It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. I think the footage is also part of the history, so what we are doing by upscaling is to create an illusion of the original footage.
romanoderoma 6y ago
> People back then didn't experience reality in BW either. We knew though... Paintings have been in colors since (almost) for ever. This is from 80BC in Pompeii https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/MANNapoli_9112_Sacrifice_Iphigenia_painting.jpg/1920px-MANNapoli_9112_Sacrifice_Iphigenia_painting.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/MA... One thing I didn't know is that statues were not white, they had colors (very strong ones), but time deleted the pigments of color leaving only the white marble. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/57/ae/ca57ae9dc5b8255c41f7c1b57ddb49a7.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/57/ae/ca57ae9dc5b8255c41f7... It means that all neo-classic sculpture is based on a wrong interpretation.
de_watcher 6y ago
Just like the ancient Greece sculptures. They are in colour.

by pier25 6y ago

tommica 6y ago

That is so true, I've also gotten similar kind of realization with being happy - so serious in most pictures, as was the style then, but then a picture of a farm couple laughing reminds me that they infact were living their lives just like we are

fossuser 6y ago
The seriousness in pictures was a cultural artifact of the time, I think partly because people treated photos like getting portraits? There's this photo from 1901 which seems really modern: https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/smiling-chinese-man-eating-rice-1901-1-5c98d17755668__700.jpg https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/0... The speculation is that he didn't know about the culture of looking serious.
- btilly 6y ago
  It was also an artifact of the technology. Cameras tended to have long exposure times. If you have to hold a position for 30 seconds, it is easier to do so with a serious face than a laughing one.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  The other aspect is the early photos required long exposures. It is hard to maintain a smile or stand still long enough, so a neutral face was requested by the photographer. Daguerreotype's required upwards of 20 minutes!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

dwighttk 6y ago

obligatory Calvin and Hobbes: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
I love Calvin and Hobbes. The inanities combined with weird "truths" still kind of speak of how perception matters. And yes, I think historians are kind of thinking of this backwards (in the same way Calvin's father explains this to Calvin).

adventured 6y ago

The colorized Peter Jackson WW1 documentary is the most dramatic example of how useful this is, of any that I've seen. I think making the past seem more real and relevant is useful in helping people to learn from and understand our history by making it more relatable. Those were real, warm blooded people with hopes and dreams, dying by the tens of thousands in 1916. The more you humanize history (rather than being a rote, soulless text or object in a book), the better. Which takes nothing away from how beautiful B&W can be, there's no reason we can't preserve that history simultaneously.

lttlrck 6y ago
They way they held back on the transition from black and white to color until a good 20-30 minutes into the movie made it all the more breathtaking when it happened. At that point you were already absorbed in the black and white footage, it was magical.

beebmam 6y ago

Every time we apply an interpretation technique, we're losing information. It is strictly an increase in entropy. That's not good from a historical perspective

mcv 6y ago
We're not actually losing anything here, though. The original still exists.
eru 6y ago
That would be true, if people were perfect absorbers of information. But they aren't. So, leaving aside that the original is still, an interpretation technique might strictly lose a bit here or there, but it might actually result in many more bits delivered to the end user.

godelski 6y ago

> it had never occurred to me that, you know, people of that time did live in color too just like we do. I think this is an important (and common) note. Especially when you look at the time-frame of most of the images and video we have being only ~100 years old (20th century). That sounds like a long time ago. B&W photos make that feel like a long time ago. But in reality, that's when your great grandma was born. That's not many people ago. In one respect it is accurate to say 100 years was a long time ago but saying it wasn't is also equally valid. While tech has changed a lot in that time, it is hard to say people have. By upscaling and colorizing these photos it makes it feel much more recent. If we accept that long and not long ago are equally valid takes, then we'd have to accept that both these ways of presenting historical information (a picture is information) are valid too. But they do tell different stories, and it is important to remember that.

derefr 6y ago

Rather than thinking of colorization (or upscaling) as a thing we do "to" a photo to alter it further from a primary-source ground-truth; another perspective (the one shared by art conservators, I think) would be to think of a photo that was taken in a too-low resolution, or in B&W (when that wasn't intentionally done for artistic effect) as a kind of "damage" done to the photo right at the time of its creation, where that "damage" moved the photo further away from achieving the photo-taker's intent (which usually, with most photos, is to losslessly convey the experience of looking at the subject of the photo, as it looked at the place and time the photo was taken.) Colorization, upscaling, etc. could then be thought of as repairing this damage, bringing the photo closer to being a lossless communication of the information it was created to convey. (By analogy: imagine a technology that could analyze an illustration drawn by someone whose hand was shaking due to Parkinsonism, and then compute what the illustration would have looked like if the artist's hand hadn't been shaking. That would also be a kind of "repair.")

eru 6y ago
Compare also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
smogcutter 6y ago
> which usually, with most photos, is to losslessly convey the experience of looking at the subject of the photo, as it looked at the place and time the photo was taken. That’s quite a strong statement, and one that I think many photographers would disagree with. Snapshots aside, this severely understates the artistic choices a photographer makes. For one thing, black & white and color read very differently to the eye, and offer different palettes for composition (although it’s not about photography, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” has a great exploration of the effects of b&w vs color and is a fun read to boot). Basically all b&w cinematography also gives the lie to this statement: it’s impossible to honestly argue that a colorization of, say, the stark expressionism of Night of the Hunter would be a repaired version. The extent to which a photo is, or is even intended to be, a representation of “primary-source ground truth” is something we’ve been arguing since, like, Edward Said. I’m not saying images should never be colorized, or upscaled, or whatever. Obviously that’s not the case. Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, as another poster mentioned, is a triumph. But it’s too complicated a conversation to dismiss by declaring, in one sentence like Moses coming down from the mountain, that the purpose of photography is the “lossless communication of information”.

nevster 6y ago

It's funny. Conversely, I've seen instances where people purposely post things in B&W to make it feel old. I'm 49 and my old school has an alumni facebook group where they occasionally post old photos. Sometimes they're from my era (ie high school in the 80's) and they post them in black and white. When I first see them, I think they're from the 40's or 50's. Then I realise they're from the 80's and I feel kind of annoyed!

tssva 6y ago
Depending on where the photos came from the source material may have been B&W. For example many year books in the 80's were still printed in B&W because it was significantly cheaper.
- nevster 6y ago
  Definitely possible.

redwall_hp 6y ago

Colorization can also help humanize the past and make it seem less distant. I recall watching a documentary on WWI (World War I in Color) that was all colorized footage. It just makes everything seem more real.

abiogenesis 6y ago

> It's an illusion, but so is the original footage. I think the footage is also part of the history, so what we are doing by upscaling is to create an illusion of the original footage.

romanoderoma 6y ago

> People back then didn't experience reality in BW either. We knew though... Paintings have been in colors since (almost) for ever. This is from 80BC in Pompeii https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/MANNapoli_9112_Sacrifice_Iphigenia_painting.jpg/1920px-MANNapoli_9112_Sacrifice_Iphigenia_painting.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/MA... One thing I didn't know is that statues were not white, they had colors (very strong ones), but time deleted the pigments of color leaving only the white marble. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/57/ae/ca57ae9dc5b8255c41f7c1b57ddb49a7.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ca/57/ae/ca57ae9dc5b8255c41f7... It means that all neo-classic sculpture is based on a wrong interpretation.

de_watcher 6y ago

Just like the ancient Greece sculptures. They are in colour.