Colorized pixs from the past

[packman]

Lewis Powell- conspirator with John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated president Abraham Lincoln





French soldiers in the trench WWI

More historical colorized pixs:


https://imgur.com/gallery/gKMoBFv

[lunasun]

1. Kick for Rasputin pic in link. Wow a difference with coloring to me

[3Hotdogs]

5. Now we know where Sarah got the idea for smoke eyes.

[sl8]

2. Nice, thanks for sharing. n/t

[sl8]

3. Why they need to be colorized:

[lapucelle]

4. THANKS!!!

What a find.

[yonder]

6. Thanks for these.

I'd always thought Grace Kelly was a beautiful woman.

Photo #26 shows her as stunningly beautiful.

[Karadeniz]

7. Thanks!!!

Brings the past to life!

[rurallib]

8. Just the picture of Auschwitz sent chills down my spine

to have that followed by Queen Elizabeth's coronation was so ironic.

I love those old pictures. Thanks

[wishstar]

9. Lewis Powell reminds me of Jude Law in Cold Mountain

Rasputin is terribly creepy

[malthaussen]

10. I've always wondered how they decide what colors to use...

... some good pix in that collection.

-- Mal

[Kind of Blue]

11. My goodness, I had a feeling the young Kenyan woman's

turban was red. One of the coolest vintage photos I've ever seen.

Thanks!

[TNNurse]

12. Would love to know the names of all those people at the Solvay conference.

I recognize Einstein and that is it.

[LeftInTX]

14. Here:

A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, E. Herzen, Th. de Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;

P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch.-E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson

I recognized Planck and Curie. Familiar with Schrodinger, Bohr and remember the names de Broglie and Pauli from textbooks.

[Ron Obvious]

15. Mme Curie in the front

Heisenberg and Niels Bohr were probably there too, but they're not as easily distinguishable from the others.

[TNNurse]

16. Bless you.

[TNNurse]

17. I suspected that was Curie.

[Snellius]

13. Oversaturated but nicely done.

The average viewer almost always likes colors with more pop than they are in the real world. Maybe because colors aren't in the real world but only in our brain.

[Nitram]

20. We all see colors differently. One person's saturation is another person's normal, one person's

blue is another person's green.

[Snellius]

22. No. Not like that. Only for color blindness.

Saturation is not the color, the hue, whether blue or green, but the intensity of the color. Fire engine red is more saturated than pink. The hue of both is still red. A saturation of 0% is always a shade of gray. Saturation is used all the time in graphics. The relative effect for any observer is the same.

With normal vision, we do see colors slightly differently but the comparative relations between the colors is pretty much the same. The whole perceivable spectrum for each person can be slightly shifted. But blue will still be the complementary opposite of orange. (If you stare at a color long enough to fix it as an after image and shut your eyes, you will "see" its complement created in the brain.) In absolute terms, whether one person's blue is another's blue is hard to compare. Tests can be done how each relates the color to another color. But since we can't see ourselves seeing or see what someone else sees, colors are relative. And only created and processed in the eye and the brain. They do not exist in the real world. Just properties of what wavelengths are emitted, reflected or absorbed. Try to imagine a color you've never seen.

Apologize for the lecture. Have always been fascinated by how we see.

[Nitram]

23. No, I'm not talking about an efect as large as color blindness. I'm talking about differences in

perception at the tonal level. I realize my choice of blue and green didn't express that. I'm aware of all you've conveyed in your lecture (which doesn't bother me - I appreciate the effort you put into being clear. It's a matter of degree, of course, but just as you pointed out, color distinctions are cultural, not physiological. Societies star with a very limited range of words for color, and as their sophistication increases, so does their perception of color. Starting with light, dark, and red, then yellow” or “green/blue”; a fifth distinction will provide the alternate of the fourth; a sixth distinction will separate “blue” and “green. Japanese kimono dyers were said to have words for the most subtle distinctions in color, which suggests that words and perception are interrelated. If we have a word for a color, we are more likely to learn to distinguish that color from others.

But back to "saturation", I believe different people perceive saturation differently. Some people are very sensitive to increased saturation, others not so much.

[Snellius]

24. Fascinating.

Actually, I was only speaking on a physiological and neurological level. Cultural differences know less about because scientifically it is harder to test and verify. They really belong to much higher brain/vision functions which involve "pattern" recognition of various sorts. Taste, aesthetics, etc. Cross cultural studies have been done. An American teenager will think certain color combinations look cool together while to a Chinese theater goer they would look like shit. And yes, how we see is affected by what "patterns" we are accustomed to emphasize or ignore.

But saturation is much simpler than that. It's usually compared to what something looks like in bright sunlight or in a dim dawn. And that's pretty straightforward. What one person sees as bright is not going to appear to another person as dimly lit or gray. Colorized photos artificially saturate certain areas and desaturate others. Not realistic but a graphic style. My only criticism above is purely aesthetic, that the effect works best when the difference between the colors and the gray is more subtle. Otherwise, gets garish with too much in-your-face "pop", as they say. There is a compensating mechanism already at work called the "constancies" that compensates for such differences but too much to get into. Basically, the brain itself, Photoshops what we see. Subtle differences are automatically enhanced. Not so subtle push it too far.

Thanks for the really interesting discussion. It's a very cool topic.

[Nitram]

25. My own use of saturation in processing raw digital photos has evolved.

My initial tendency was to overdo saturation. Now I move it to just noticeable and back off a little unless the lighting was so poor that the colors are totally washed out.

The Japanese have been recording their thoughts about color for over a thousand years, so there is an excellent record of how views of color changed over time. You might find this article interesting.

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/color-in-japan/

[Snellius]

26. That's so great.

I'm a graphic designer largely but love pictures of all kinds. Minor in art history. Study and write a bit about the history and theory of how we see. Recently the post-retina idea that we see in pictures. Most of my experience with coloring has come from furniture creation. Working with aniline and natural dyes like black walnut. Seems that over time all colors, other than mineral pigments like lapis, no matter how brilliant, they all age to brown.

I've also learned from experience that, with saturation, the eye tends to automatically enhance differences, just as it enhances edges, and to compensate you have to take that into account.

Thanks again, Nitram. Wonderful resource to explore.

[smirkymonkey]

18. I love these posts! Amazing photos. I could look at old photographs forever.

Damn, Lewis Powell is hot!

[Nitram]

19. Interesting the effect color has on my reaction to the photos.

It seems to bring them into the present, make the people more ordinary and human.

[dhill926]

21. exactly what I thought....

[Snellius]

27. The most famous example is the girl in a red dress in Schindler's List

The film is all in a toned black and white, as if, this is not how it was but how we are used to seeing it in memory, through old newsreels and faded photographs, and then unexpectedly a single young girl in a red coat, the only color, who suddenly, as she's led to her death, seems to come out of the story past. As if to say, this is not just a film documentary of events but a reminder of human experiences that happened in real life.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

29. I sometimes wonder how kids today relate differently to, say, photos from the 1970s than...

...I related to photos from the 30s and 40s when my parents grew up.


I sometimes had to remind myself my parents didn’t grow up in a black and white world. It’s just the photos they had that made it seem like such a different time. Like another world. As a kid I found myself feeling sorry for them that they grew up in such primitive times.

I wonder if kids today see as much of a difference from the 70s and 80s to now. I don’t but of course I may be biased because I lived through it.

Do kids today view the 70s like I viewed the 40s or 30s?

[Nitram]

30. Both my grandmothers grew up in a world that had no electric lights and no cars.

Everything was horse-drawn. The "ice-box" was a box with ice in it. The ice man came by to replenish your supply. If you lived in the city, coal was dropped down a chute into your cellar for the furnace. The only way to go to Europe was by ship. Talk about "primitive times!"

[Collimator]

28. Captioning Rasputin

As the Russian Queen's lover is irresponsible. Many theories abound regarding Rasputin's hold over the Russian monarchs. A relationship with the Empress/Czarina/Tsarina (not Queen) is a fringe opinion that cannot be proven.

[paleotn]

31. Incredible!

[Major Nikon]

32. I'm not a big fan of colorized photos or movies

I get that some people are and I’m not knocking their appreciation. I just see photography as an art form and colorization as a distraction from the original artist’s work. I also think there’s a certain aspect to B&W that has its own value.

[Boomer]

33. I think you're missing the point

The impact of coloring bl&wh photos is more about bringing history to life, and less about creating art.

From an artistic/aesthetic perspective, I prefer the original bl&wh images, but coloring them has a different kind of emotional impact. The feelings they rouse are more about immersion in that world, seeing the connection between "then" and "now" more clearly. Blurring the sharp lines between the past and the present makes a statement of its own.

This isn't an "either or" choice. We can have both and enjoy each version for its own merits.

[Major Nikon]

34. When you describe the emotional response associated with the images, you are talking about art

That's what art does. So the different emotional response you are referring to is a result of modifying an original piece of art into something else which mimics art and will be perceived by most as art, but really isn't art at all. In doing so you forever alter people's perception of the original work of art. I just think it's worth mentioning as food for thought. It's not something I'm going to lose sleep over.

[KG]

35. uh, oh; imgur

see you in 3 hours