How do you bring back color from black and white images and videos?
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They don’t. When you look at a colour photograph, there are multiple things going on. Any particular surface has a colour hue or tone, this is what you think of as colours. Blue, red, yellow etc.
Those surfaces also have a luminosity or brightness. Some areas are light, others are dark and degrees in between those two. And of course, surfaces have other qualities like translucency and reflectivity.
A black and white photo captures most of those qualities so you have almost all of the information you need.
The only thing that’s missing is the colour itself. So what a colourist does is leave all of that luminosity information in place, that’s already present in the black and white photo. You just have to select colours and paint over surfaces while telling your software to keep the luminosity in place but add the colour hue.
So if you’re wearing jeans in a black and white picture, I can guess that they’re blue. So I paint a suitably blue colour over the top of those jeans while retaining the light and dark areas of the black and white image.
I could be wrong though, you could have been wearing red jeans instead of blue. For historical accuracy, a colorist should have some knowledge about his subject. But most of the time, the people who see the image are also missing that knowledge and won’t notice any mistakes.
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