How does color restoration work for black and white films?

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Recently saw professionally restored ww2 footage and was wondering how they “restore” color from a camera and film that didn’t have the hardware to capture color. I don’t know that much about photography so I’ve always been baffled by this

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are few thing to consider.

1. We know the colour we can see that is the visible light/spectrum which can be primarily define by red, green and blue. Any other colour is a combination of those colour. Hence, you see most thing especially photoshop, keyboard always go by RGB. (red, green and blue).

This is a crucial fact in deciphering black and white photo.

Look at these [photo](https://www.stuartlowphotography.co.uk/black-white-photography-tips-for-digital-photographers/).

Look closely at the red, blue and green filter.

FYI, Green filter allow green light through, blue filter allow blue light through etc.

Let’s compare between blue filter against red and green of the sky. You’ll realize that blue filter has a lighter colour (More white) compare to green and red filter.

How much lighter(whiter) the picture will be will determine how much of the colour intensity will be. Dying (dye) and combining the [negative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_(photography)) will result in a [coloured](http://freegifmaker.me/images/2fM2L/) picture.

ELI5 : Back in the days, we only have camera to capture black and white but different colour provides different intensity and thus colour is added back based on the intensity of the photo.

Colour photography is the centre of astronomy in the current era. Most photo we take are actually black and white but are coloured based on the intensity of gas emitted certain light wavelength. You can learn more about this from [vox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSG0MnmUsEY).

Source : [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSG0MnmUsEY), [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky)