<story><title>YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historians want them to stop</title><url>https://www.wired.co.uk/article/history-colourisation-controversy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedberg10</author><text>&amp;quot;The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let&amp;#x27;s try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That&amp;#x27;s just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.&lt;p&gt;So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn&amp;#x27;t very realistic.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn&amp;#x27;t look like you think it did. You&amp;#x27;re just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TylerE</author><text>It absolutely was &lt;i&gt;possible&lt;/i&gt;, although certainly not readily available.&lt;p&gt;Most notably the work of Russian chemist Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who took absolutely stunning color photos around 1910.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B9_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD-%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historians want them to stop</title><url>https://www.wired.co.uk/article/history-colourisation-controversy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedberg10</author><text>&amp;quot;The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve tried to make that point, but I failed many times. Let&amp;#x27;s try this crowd: We know what colors human faces have, so we can nail those, but coloring a film from, say, the 1950s the way photos from that era looked, is not what the colors back then actually looked like. That&amp;#x27;s just how camera technology was able to capture them at the time.&lt;p&gt;So even if you captured color back then, it probably wasn&amp;#x27;t very realistic.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think people should stop experimenting, I find these videos fascinating and loved Peter Jacksons film, but the past didn&amp;#x27;t look like you think it did. You&amp;#x27;re just used to it because all the photographs from the era look a certain way but they were limited.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>srtjstjsj</author><text>People didn&amp;#x27;t look like books either, and didn&amp;#x27;t look like pottery&amp;#x2F;statue fragments with the paint washed off, but historians aren&amp;#x27;t trying to ban that.&lt;p&gt;There are whole pseudo-intellectual cultures like Objectivists who think that peak of culture are statues with the paint worn off and reading scripts of plays meant to be experienced in live performance.</text></comment>