The “B&W in Color” Fallacy

[Nick Komiya]

The “B&W-in-Color” Fallacy

Colorful Controversies

Don’t be fooled into thinking that original colors can be determined from B&W photos.

More and more often, we come across colorized photos from WW2, and that might give you the wrong impression that there is a secret, scientific way to interpret original color from B&W photos.

However, if you are knowledgeable about photography, you will know that black and white photos only record the relative value, brightness or luminosity of the objects and filters out the other critical two factors i.e. hue and saturation (chroma) required to scientifically define specific colors to the human eye.

But this lone factor of luminosity (light Value), that B&W photos capture, already varies greatly depending on light intensity, like the time of day and year the photo was taken.

Thus the same object photographed at a different time of day will get represented in differing luminosities and appear to have been in different colors. Conversely, when luminosities match between two different photos, they may erroneously be interpreted as having the same color even when one is actually brown and the other grey.

Thus when lighting conditions shift between B&W photos, it becomes totally futile to use them to guess the original color of the object.

[Nick Komiya]

Color-blind Monochrome?

To get to the point about the magic of colorized photos, specialists in colorization of B&W photos can only rely on educated guesses on all of the 3 elements that define color.

But even before starting the "guessing game" on those three defining factors, comes the question, “How true to life is the B&W photo itself?”.

It might sound like an oxymoron, but B&W film of earlier days actually suffered from color blindness.

The human eye perceives colors as a mix of Blue, Green and Red waves of light, but the earliest B&W films could only catch blue light reflected back from objects, causing white-out of blue skies, for instance.

Then the Orthochromatic B&W film, prevalent in prewar days, responded to blue and green, but was totally blind to red. Thus prewar B&W prints from orthochromatic film portrays red as pitch black (see photo demonstration below).

Only with the postwar use of Panchromatic Monochromes did the true range of luminosity come to be correctly represented.

[Nick Komiya]

The Dino Jigsaw Puzzle

Once the colorization expert has an idea of this idiosyncrasy of the monochrome film used, and knows how to compensate for the bias, he can finally start out by defining color brightness.

This they do by keying onto hints like the flora, length of shadows to judge the season, and time of day. Photoshop, originally being a photo development application, comes in handy to simulate the various lighting scenarios at this stage.

Color saturation is somewhat easier to predict as it follows the principle of perspective, having lower saturation values the farther the object in the photo gets.

The real challenge is guessing the hues. This they do by keying in colors of objects for which the true colors are known. The blue sky and human skin colors are basic keys, and additionally those specializing in military photos will key in field-greys and browns of uniform colors.

We now know that there is no magic and that it’s all hard guesswork. Atsushi Yamashita, Japan’s foremost expert, specializing in military photo colorization, summarizes the nature of the exercise by comparing his work to reconstructing images of dinosaurs.

There are constant updates as more facts become known, such as the type of light bulbs used at the time for lighting, etc and any output provided is only the best approximation he could produce within current means and scientific knowledge.

Here at this site is Yamashita’s colorization work, also shown below.

[Texengland]

That is really cool.

[RussM]

Some great pics of ships and carriers in the link!

[MAP]

Very educational Nick. Thanks

[Danmark]

I still think its all magic!!

[Nick Komiya]

Here's another example of how colorization is done.

Yamashita was commissioned to colorize this photo of a London subway station from 1900.

[Nick Komiya]

This was what his finished work looked like.

[Nick Komiya]

The key to determining the critical element of hue was the discovery by Yamashita of a surviving example of the rightmost poster featuring two cats.

This sample was converted to monochrome to determine relative color luminosity (light Value). Then the colors were taken off this example and grafted onto the other posters on the wall, according to their light values.

When the color combinations did not make sense in other posters, they needed to be adjusted in hue until it made sense within the given brightness of color.