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When an image is converted to black and white, information is destroyed. This information can never be recovered without access to the true colors in the scene

When an image is converted to black and white, information is destroyed. This information can never be recovered without access to the true colors in the scene when the image was taken. You can tell that information is destroyed because there are multiple possible re-colorizations of a black and white image. When you convert a black and white image back to color, you are not restoring the original true colors, rather you are filling them in based on your priors. It is logically impossible to "restore" the original colors by doing data processing on only the image itself. It is only possible to give the appearance of a restoration.

derefr 6y ago
Yes, and? Art conservation isn't about recovering the original information. It's about making the work do the job it was intended to do. If there's a big hole in the middle of a painting, the painting is currently doing a bad job of being a painting, because the hole is distracting people from looking at and experiencing the rest of the painting. If you, as a conservator, fill in the hole (in a reversible way) with, well, anything, it'll likely stand out less than the hole itself did. And, therefore, the painting will now have been "repaired", in the sense that it's now doing a better job of communicating the art that the painter intended to communicate by painting it, than it did when there was a big hole in it. Same thought process with colorization. A B&W's medium distracts the modern viewer, who is used to color photos, from the photo's intended message. For modern B&W photos, the B&W look is part of the message; but for B&W photos taken when B&W photos were the only kind of photos (especially candid or portrait photos, rather than "art" photos), this choice of medium is mostly unintentional. Colorizing the photo—even somewhat poorly, like with old Technicolor movies—will result in the viewer of the photo being less distracted by the photo's medium than they would by a B&W photo; and therefore paying more attention to the content of the photo itself. Which is, in most cases, what the photo's taker would want.

derefr 6y ago

Yes, and? Art conservation isn't about recovering the original information. It's about making the work do the job it was intended to do. If there's a big hole in the middle of a painting, the painting is currently doing a bad job of being a painting, because the hole is distracting people from looking at and experiencing the rest of the painting. If you, as a conservator, fill in the hole (in a reversible way) with, well, anything, it'll likely stand out less than the hole itself did. And, therefore, the painting will now have been "repaired", in the sense that it's now doing a better job of communicating the art that the painter intended to communicate by painting it, than it did when there was a big hole in it. Same thought process with colorization. A B&W's medium distracts the modern viewer, who is used to color photos, from the photo's intended message. For modern B&W photos, the B&W look is part of the message; but for B&W photos taken when B&W photos were the only kind of photos (especially candid or portrait photos, rather than "art" photos), this choice of medium is mostly unintentional. Colorizing the photo—even somewhat poorly, like with old Technicolor movies—will result in the viewer of the photo being less distracted by the photo's medium than they would by a B&W photo; and therefore paying more attention to the content of the photo itself. Which is, in most cases, what the photo's taker would want.