Colorized Photos - wow.
 

These just blew me away and I thought I'd share. These historical photos underwent some extreme digital rendering and I can't believe the difference. I'm very impressed.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401126318.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401126332.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401126346.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401126360.jpg

Here's the full spread here.

I always assumed there were no colors until about 1950.

Over 100 years ago there was a Russian chemist named Prokudin-Gorskii who was commissioned by the Tsar to travel the Empire and document it photographically. He developed a process for taking color photographs using black and white glass plates. He exposed three identical positive images on a glass plate through three different color filters, (yellow, magenta and cyan). The developed images could only then be properly view when projected overlapping through the same filters so the images all registered precisely on a screen. After the revolution he was exiled to western Europe and took his glass plates with him. Today the black and white images can be scanned into a computer with the colors added, the three images combined with a fourth image generated from the three originals in black to add shadows and all used to recreate the color scenes.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401130333.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401130389.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1401130453.jpg

Anyone else think USG looks a lot like Robin Williams?

Ha, that's funny! Or like Russell Crow!

Far more impressive than the "colorized" pics of the 90's which looked absolutely contrived.

These look great.

When my daughter was about 5 she asked when colours were invented. She'd been watching some old newsreel & WWII films I had on video and thought that the world must have been in black and white back then.

We still remind her of that occasionally.

The age of enlightenment...

I've seen these before, and what strikes me more than anything is, aside from fashion, how suddenly "normal" everything looks. Sam blue sky, same green grass, same buildings. The more things change...

It's cool how those photos really illustrate how wide the apertures were in some of those photos, leaving a really narrow focal depth... particularly this one:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/...9_964x1020.jpg

Large format cameras like a 8x10 view camera use a 300 MM lens as the "normal" lens. Equivalent to a 50MM lens on a 35 mm film camera. Many portraits were shot with longer focal length lenses to avoid being to close to the subject.

Focus is super critical on large format cameras. It is easy to have a sharp focus on the eyes and have the tip of the nose and the ears of the subject out of focus.

Looking at these pictures is like stepping back in time.

The one thing that always seems to be off in the old colorized photos is skin tone. Most people have moles and freckles or some other skin discolorations. In the previous colorized photos, the digital artists seem to forgo putting these imperfections in. Makes the photos look contrived or "artsy" instead of realistic.

Leland Pate-
Thanks for posting these beautiful pictures. I have been a Civil War buff since I was a young man and have spent many hours metal detecting and collecting Civil War relics. I really enjoyed the photos.