Are the colors based purely on their assumptions/imagination, or do the greyscale images retain some sort of data that tells what color on what part?
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There’s a lot of explanations here that mostly amount to research and guessing, some that mention specific types of film that react a little bit more to certain types of light and color, but I’d like to mention that black and white photography both older and recent can have colored panes of glass you put in front of the lens to change the image. It still takes a black and white photo.
this is lengthy but demonstrates and explains colored lenses on black and white photography. Polarizing filters also affect this.
If you as a colorizer notice certain things (the sky being very dark in a brightly lit shot) or have notes on the photo that detail the lens and film used, you can be rather certain of the hue. Some photos may have several lenses in a set taken by the photographer at the same time of the same subject, if even one other lens is used you basically can have nearly 100% certainty of the color of the photo.
In these photos, guessing and individual object research is not very necessary, but it requires knowledge of the equipment used or several techniques were used in a series of shots that you have access to.
In older portrait photography there is a pretty understood set of typical equipment and methods and others have explained well how that works, there’s probably going to be guessing involved to some extent. For well known artistic photographers taking pictures of landscapes and daily life and etc, many extensively documented (or outright invented and showed off) the equipment and techniques and guessing isn’t necessary.
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