Black and white films - colour restoration

HellsBells

HellsBells

Striker
Contributor
How do they do it?

Sitting here watching it’s a wonderful life in colour. Notwithstanding it just looks wrong, I am still amazed at the quality.

How do they turn black and white fillums into colour ones?
 


HellsBells said:
How do they do it?

Sitting here watching it’s a wonderful life in colour. Notwithstanding it just looks wrong, I am still amazed at the quality.

How do they turn black and white fillums into colour ones?
Click to expand...
I've done it before with black and white pictures. It's easy enough, just long-winded. Like colouring a picture book in essence.
 
HellsBells said:
How do they do it?

Sitting here watching it’s a wonderful life in colour. Notwithstanding it just looks wrong, I am still amazed at the quality.

How do they turn black and white fillums into colour ones?
Click to expand...

The colours of clothes and scenery were often selected with a view to how they'd look in black and white. You see a lot of purple or pink in colourized films, not because those colours were in vogue but because they transposed well.
 
HellsBells said:
Aye but how many pictures make up a film?
Click to expand...
As the article explains, in film more often than not, the previous frame is similar to the current one. Which means that the colours can be partially reused in the current frame.

There's also more powerful software available these days that can recognise areas of the image as objects, meaning just plotting a limited amount of colours will be enough to colourise the image.
https://gizmodo.com/ai-powered-software-makes-it-incredibly-easy-to-coloriz-1795298582
 
Monty Pigeon said:
The colours of clothes and scenery were often selected with a view to how they'd look in black and white. You see a lot of purple or pink in colourized films, not because those colours were in vogue but because they transposed well.
Click to expand...
You should, in theory, be able to colour things any colour you wish and, laid over the details of the original black and white images, it should look decent. I'm not sure every colour in restored movies actually corresponds to what the actor or scene was actually like.
 
Like the world war 1 in colour I watched. When you watch it in black and white it feels old but when you see it in colour you'd think it could be only 40 years ago.

Monty Pigeon said:
The colours of clothes and scenery were often selected with a view to how they'd look in black and white. You see a lot of purple or pink in colourized films, not because those colours were in vogue but because they transposed well.
Click to expand...
The blood in the psycho shower scene was chocolate syrup to come across better on film
 
Lexingtongue said:
You should, in theory, be able to colour things any colour you wish and, laid over the details of the original black and white images, it should look decent. I'm not sure every colour in restored movies actually corresponds to what the actor or scene was actually like.
Click to expand...

That's true, though in the early years of colourization (I'm thinking especially of Hitchcock's Suspicion) efforts were made to be aiuthentic to the set and wardrobe. Hence the odd colours.

Here's a typical set designed for filming in black and white:

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Monty Pigeon said:
That's true, though in the early years of colourization (I'm thinking especially of Hitchcock's Suspicion) efforts were made to be aiuthentic to the set and wardrobe. Hence the odd colours.

Here's a typical set designed for filming in black and white:

Logon or register to see this image
Click to expand...
Bizarre their front room was pink, like!
 

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