You might have seen some of these colorized photos on the internet.
Mark Twain, Amelia Earhart, a young Charlie Chaplin.
It’s incredible how normal these people look because they’re no longer in black
and white.
Like they’re someone you could pass by on the street and not someone unreachable or
from another time.
What I love about these photos is that they show people and moments in history that have
never been seen in color — except by those who were actually there.
I talked to several artists who do this work to try to figure out what it is about adding
color to photos that seems to make years of separation fade away.
One of those artists is Jordan Lloyd, and he actually does this for a living.
He and his small London-based team at Dynamichrome use modern technology to digitally reconstruct
history’s black and white record.
When you’re missing the color, you’re kind of looking at the entire composition
as a whole.
Whereas when you add the color you start looking at the photograph in a slightly different
way, and you start picking up all these really interesting details that you might not have
noticed before.
This change in perspective is why these images feel like they’ve suddenly “come to life.”
Like, when you see workers from over 80 years ago wearing blue denim, you instantly see
something you can relate to.
Colorization makes old photos look more current.
But adding color to black and white photos isn’t new.
It’s a practice that is nearly as old as photography itself.
It dates back to the 1800s when images were colored by hand or through a process called
Photochrom, which added anywhere from six to 15 layers of color to a photo negative.
But these didn’t exactly end up looking super realistic, at least not like this, for
example.
With digital colorization, the difference is that software like Photoshop, along with
a vast number of online resources, has made it possible for artists to reconstruct images
with far more accuracy.
They can turn to historical documents to find the exact colors that would recreate a moment
in time.
Sounds simple, right?
Yeah, it’s a shitload of work [laughs].
The secret to doing the research for the colorization is, you now have a wealth of information,
it’s just knowing where to look.
It means digging through diaries and memoirs, government records, old advertisements, and
even consulting historical experts to be sure that the colors and styles of the time are
faithfully represented.
A good colorizer has a good network of people to call on.
We had one guy, he’s like a specialist at ethnographic dress.
You know, he was showing me, like, museum-grade samples, you know, and he lives and breathes
this stuff so, like, every single little detail, like the color of beads on a Laplander necklace
or something, you know, it’s really: “This has got to be the exact thing.”
Take this photo series of Tutankhamun’s tomb, which was discovered by Howard Carter
in 1922.
Jordan colorized these images based on the archaeologist’s detailed hand-written notes.
And by cross-referencing his journals with restored artifacts on display at the Egyptian
Museum in Cairo, he was able to recreate what that day looked like almost a hundred years
ago.
Research like this allows colorizers to stay true to the historical moment.
And sometimes a single photograph can reveal a thing or two about the past.
Like, did you know that until the late 60s, 7UP’s logo was red on black, instead of
the green we know today?
That’s really important to know if you want to colorize this photo from 1938.
And if you wanted to recreate this day in Paris in 1888, you would need to know that
the incomplete Eiffel Tower was painted a color called “Venetian red.”
All right, so how do they actually do it?
Essentially, it’s literally taking a graphics tablet and, you know, literally coloring within
the lines.
Okay, obviously it isn’t actually that simple.
It all starts with the careful repairing of any cracks and scratches the black and white
photo picked up through decades of deterioration in storage.
Once the image has been restored to its original state, dozens and up to hundreds of layers
of color are painstakingly added and blended together.
Human skin alone can have up to 20 layers of pinks, yellows, greens, reds, and blues
to simulate what a living person is supposed to look like.
It can take hours, even days to finish a single image.
I think the longest I’ve spent on an image is nearly a month.
What comes next is pretty interesting, because even after meticulous research, restoration,
and blending of colors, there’s something that every good colorization artist needs
to have: an intuitive understanding of how light works in the atmosphere.
Light affects our perception of color, so even though research can give you the color
information, you’ll need to take into account how those colors looked under a specific lighting
condition.
But how can you tell?
You can usually tell what the atmospheric conditions were based on things like shadows,
and triangulation of light location, things like that.
For example, this photo was taken in the late afternoon.
Look at the long shadows the people are casting on the sidewalk.
The sun is low, and at this time of day, often referred to as “the golden hour,” everything
is cast in a sort of orange glow, which you can see in the reflections of this car.
Or take a look at this photo of Harry Houdini from 1912.
The cloudy and hazy sky, the soft, almost invisible shadows, and Houdini’s windswept
hair are all strong indicators that this was a dreary day at the New York docks, which
calls for muted colors and a greenish tint.
But weather conditions aren’t the only thing to consider.
Reflected light off of certain materials influences color too.
Like the orange glow of molten steel, or light bouncing up from a blue carpet, for example.
These kinds of details are critical to simulating an environment and achieving true photorealism.
I should take a second here to mention that not everyone is into the work colorization
artists are doing.
There’s been some pushback, with critics arguing that these photos should be left untouched.
There’s a lot of accusations, not just to me but to pretty much anyone who does it,
which is that, you know, we’re vandalizing art or fucking up history.
And the thing about that is that these things are not supposed to be substitutes for original
documents.
It sits alongside the original.
But it’s not a substitute; it’s a supplement.
Colorization artists are able to create such high-quality versions of old images because
institutions like the Library of Congress and the US National Archive have carefully
digitized and cataloged thousands of original documents from over a century and a half of
photographic history.
And since these photos are in the public domain, they can be altered in any way.
Which means that we get to see a color photo of Abraham Lincoln, blue eyes and all.
Beyond the fact that these are really fun to look at, colorization presents a new perspective
on history.
It offers a more relatable look at huge moments, like the construction of the Hoover Dam.
And small ones too.
You find out all these amazing stories.
When you start looking at all the individual things.
What happened to all these companies?
What happened to this person, what happened here?
And all of a sudden, you no longer see history as a linear timeline, but rather it’s a
tapestry of all these extremely rich moments.
It’s really mind-blowing, actually.