Russia in color, a century ago

As to the purpose of your post, no I still don't get it. You're either "describing" what anyone who knows anything about photography already knows, or it's a criticism of these photographs as being much less an accurate representation of color reality than modern photography is. If your "description" is supposed to entail that, then that putative entailment seems false to me. All color photography is just a gross approximation of reality, but with the aim of the approximations not being overly noticeable to the human eye. Kind of like how MP3's are only a gross approximation of the actual sound, but for which the aim is to be psycho-acoustically accurate.

As to anyone asserting that the original photographer was using some space-aged technology, where did anyone ever state such a thing? All I've seen is amazement over seeing photographs from the time that preserved information such that it could be later rendered in a way that we're not used to experiencing in photographs from that time period. Don't take the joy out of life.

Or maybe you wish to assert that the process used here to make the contemporary rendering of these photos is little different than it would be to take the original negatives for old technicolor films from the '30s and use them to produce more modern and psycho-visually accurate color images. Or to do the same for photography from any time period and use the data contained in it to make more accurate renderings. Well, those might also be interesting projects!

That sentence says, no you don't understand.

The images are monochromes, set with chemistry. 100yrs ago.

Then they are scanned into a computer.

Imported into photoshop.

The color is from photoshop.

The working color space is from photoshop.

The output color space is from photoshop.

Ergo, they look like photoshop.

PJ's use photshop all the time, there is nothing nefarious.

But the "look" is a function of the post-processing.

Provided a somewhat reasonable monochrome scan quality.

In fact, images are shot on overcast days to maximize the post-processing range of the output images.

Thats how you max tonal seperability and ability to punch the color without blowing the dynamic range.

Its counterintuitive, but true.

A modern look is a dull image input + aggressive tonal controls.

This is exactly what NASA does from the digital files from Mars.

Or what the NY times does on its news stories, etc.

Its "cool". Its just different than what you think it is.

shawnc 19 hours ago | link | parent | flag

These are so amazing. The world wasn't sepia toned a hundred years ago! As silly as that statement is, my brain is actually having a hard time really believing these photos are from 100 years ago. I'm in awe.

OK. This was the original statement. The somewhat minor but technical point I was making is as follows. There is a simple explanation. The world then looked like it does today. And the image itself is modern, so it looks modern. Thats it. The Awe of this? Its called the "uncanney valley". Its kinda-almost-sorta-perfect-but-off-a-bit.

How did they do this then? Easy, the colorwork is done in photoshop, using contemporary techniques. PS allows them to exploit the latent image data, and map it onto one of many "style" outputs. [1]

You can debate this or not. But its cited in the footnotes above. If you havent read them, take a look.

I understand all of that you say?

Ok. You so, you are now in "awe of photoshop".

The technical reasons for this are not hard.

I'll stop here, because I think any more technical is not going to help you.

I've done a fair amount of photography...

Again, I would encourage you to do research on colour theory. If you do your own work, it will help you immensely, to make the most of your images. And if you really are an expert in this already, you know how trivial it is to produce "contemporary" style images from these formats, given the datasets you have to play with.

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Edit: For the general reader

[1] Style. In the sense i'm using it here is a mix of overall color, texture, tone, sharpness, saturation, hue, tint, noise, and other basic image editing techniques. Without getting into a discussion about "color" (ie, not "accuracy" but more correctly temp, tint, gamut, etc), its important to understand that the "look" has a lot of potential. Think about instagram. All of those filters are just "style" presets. But they don't look alike. Some are contemporary, some are retro, etc. It only requires a certain base image quaity to "take" the style (ie, good enough to not be ruined at the pixel level). So you might have an image which out of iphone looks "OK" and then in instagram is "Cool" or whatever. But the look of the "instagram" is independent of the landscape (which always looks the same, sepia toned on your phone or not). Now, the question is, what limits the "style"? And thats where the color technicals come in. If your input is messed up, your gamut and balance and tint will not let your image "take" a style. Because the transitions (ie, curves, etc) will destroy your pixel base. The size of your gamut, will determin the range you can execute. Now, with film, the color-setting step is a one-shot deal. There are no 12 instagram settings - you get just one - film/chemistry setting. You gett a little bit of flex at the print (color mix, etc) but not much. If you scan the film, then you are opening up to 12 syles (or whatever). So, now we get to the point. None of the film emulsions (prior to NC portra) really give you a contemporary look. To get that, you have to bring the image into digital. The temp/tint/contrast levels are just not there. Thats why its "odd" seing an old image looking like NC portra film or like a 2000+ PJ photoshop. And you can double check by looking at the details, if your an expert. The monochrome seperations have good tonal information, which is a credit to the guys back 100 years ago. But the modernists of that era were some of the best photogs ever, and among the most technically brilliant in monochrom image capture.