Let’s say in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, videos were only played in black and white. How is it now that they can be colourized? Is it a matter of people adding colour to the videos that may or may not be their actual colours or did cameras capture colour too?
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A lot of it is done by artificial intelligence, though it can be done manually as well (is more often done for single photos). Most colorized images have bleaker colors than the original since we don’t have any color data, and guesses aren’t perfect.
>Is it a matter of people adding colour to the videos that may or may not be their actual colours
This is it.
It used to be that when you saw something colorized a person literally like…painted the color on the black and white photo. Nowadays I’m sure a lot of it is done semi-automatically with software, especially for films as opposed to photos.
That said, generally speaking, the people colonizing old photos professionally put in a lot of work to try and make sure the colors are as accurate as possible. It’s not like they just pick whatever colors they want.
Both of the answers here are correct, but also, depending on when the photo (or film) was taken, it actually was “taken” in color, but it was developed in black and white. The cellulose reacted to the wavelengths of light the same way, but transferring the image from the negative to another medium dropped the color out. If the negative is still available, a colorized image can be created. This is an extremely rare and niche example.
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It’s literally just a person (or AI) guessing what the colors of things were. If someone was wearing pants that are obviously jeans, then the artist can just make those pants some shade of blue. They can also go one step further and do research into historically accurate colors and then use those colors. For example, if there’s a record of Levi’s using a certain shade of blue in their jeans from 1905 to 1920. They can match the color as best they can.
There’s not color in the original file that just needs to be ‘unlocked’ through some computer process. It’s literally just a guess.
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