Colour from B&W

paddyland

Hi, I wonder is it at all possible to estimate colours from black and white photographs? Is there anything in the hue that gives a clue, or is it purely guess work?

I have a few old B&W photos, and I'd love to know what colours were there.

red_ice

im interested in this too.

There was a documentary on discovery channel or something where they managed to pull colour from black and white world war 2 footage.(might have been this)

Is it possible?

Noodleworm

seems very unlikely with normal commercial software. especially if its a scan, the only information the computer gets is the shades of greys, you can re-colour manually but I don't really know if you can get that kind of info.

maybe theres a way of telling what colours become what shades of grey?

5uspect

Greyscale is essentially an average of the RGB values.

So you have no idea if the grey shade you see is red, blue or green.

Any shade in the first column could correspond to any colour in the RGB columns.



You may be able to reduce your data somewhat depending on the context.
A person's face probably only has certain colours and hence you can do come kind of linear combination of the weighted components.

Dublin_Gunner

hmm - you ever see those recoloured WWII films, like Discovery / History showed a while ago?

I wonder if they used some sort of digital technique for recolouring, or were they done by hand? (digitally obviously)

5uspect

Were they recoloured or origionally shot in colour and just cleaned up?

Dublin_Gunner

5uspect wrote: »

Were they recoloured or origionally shot in colour and just cleaned up?

AFAIK original B&W and digitally recoloured, at least some / a lot of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_colorization

5uspect

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

AFAIK original B&W and digitally recoloured, at least some / a lot of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_colorization

Cool. Interesting reading.

red_ice

Dublin_Gunner wrote: »

hmm - you ever see those recoloured WWII films, like Discovery / History showed a while ago?

I wonder if they used some sort of digital technique for recolouring, or were they done by hand? (digitally obviously)

you mean like the link i posed right after the OP?

Dublin_Gunner

red_ice wrote: »

you mean like the link i posed right after the OP?

Lovely youtube vid, not much help though as it doesn't explain how its done - which is what we were getting at.

You can embed youtube vids in your post btw.