Eli5: How do photo restoration artists know the supposed colors of greyscale images?

Question

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?

In: 641

Answer 1

Hobbyists go on assumption if there are no color representations to compare to. Higher end operations (that colorize films for example), use software that can analyze known colors in a shot (for example, the grass, bricks, even clothes or hair color that there is a color record of) and extrapolate.