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 al…
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.
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 al…
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.
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.