I’m not a fan of b&w colorization. Often the colors are wrong, either outright color errors (like choices for clothing or cars) or often not taking in to account lighting conditions (late in day shadows but midday brightness).
Then there is the issue of B&W movies. Using this kind of tech might not give pleasing results as the colors used for sets and outfits were chosen to work well for film contrast and not for story accuracy. That “blue” dress might really be green. (Please, just leave B&W movies the way they are.)
I think keeping the art as it was produced is important but there is also a good history of modifying art to produce new art too. In the digital age, we aren’t losing the original art so it seems even stranger to be against modification of the “original.”
However, just applying a simple filter (or single transform without effort) definitely feels derivative to me.
I have always viewed them as "more relatable". People may well be biased to think of more relatable things as more true, but I don't think that is the fault of the colourisation or how it is presented.
Maybe you're used to looking at B&W stuff and effortlessly figuring out what the scene is depicting, but for me at least it's very hard. Adding a little color makes it much easier. In that regard, it doesn't matter to me if the colors are wrong.
(Perhaps it just takes some getting used to. Back when I read a black and white comic for the first time (as a child), I had a hard time figuring out things at first but got used to it at some point.)
I think the point being made is that movies were made for the B&W end result, not just shooting color with B&W film.
For instance, fake blood in B&W was often produced with black liquid. Colorizing it correctly just doesn't make sense. Or a green or blue dress can be chosen because of the way it looks on film, not because it's supposed to BE a green or blue dress.
Not specific to colorization, but didn’t something like this happen with the Star Wars trilogy? Lucas made a re-release with a few edits (that were not universally liked) and it’s now impossible to purchase a new copy of the original version (or something like that, I only remember hearing about it).
I don’t see why it matters if the blue dress was really green. The result is either an enhanced experience or not, if it is then minor inaccuracies don’t seem relevant.
If there's a source that a blue dress was green, then that could be taken into consideration for recoloring, but as you said, it's to enhance the experience, not to be 100% accurate.
Quite often, colorized pics and movies have people wear blue-ish clothing, which is fairly unbelievable. It's a gimmick that produces an effect that's not quite right for a goal for which it's not suitable. Because what is it that colorizations try to achieve? To make people think "Oh, so that's how it looked back then"? Then there shouldn't be errors in the image. And if it makes the pictures more relatable, or whatever handwaivy arguments are being thrown around, then non-colorized pictures will become even less relatable, in effect alienating people from recent history (if you believe such arguments).
I'd like to make one exception, though, for They Shall not Grow Old. That was impressive.
I think colorization with some effort put in can be pretty decent. E.g. I prefer the 2007 colorization of It's a Wonderful Life to the original. It's never perfect but I don't think that's a prerequisite to being better. Some will always disagree though.
About every completely automated colorized video tends to be pretty bad though. Particularly the YouTube "8k colorized interpolated" kind of low effort channels where they just let them pump out without caring if it's actually any good.
Yeah it's cool tech but I really don't appreciate how it is just straight up deceitful and spreading misinformation. A lot of hues are underdetermined and the result is more or less arbitrary in a historical context. If one were to research and fine-tune the model such that ambiguous shades are historically accurate I would be less annoyed by the sense that these images are just spreading misinformation. Compare this with Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky's photos of the Russian Empire or autochromes of Paris in 1910 which are actual windows into a lost world.
*for works of fiction these issues vanish, but for any historical or documentary photographs/films, I really hate that I am being lied to.
Nope - fundamentally different. First, multispectral imaging is a mapping of information into a form that can be easily seen and interpreted. It is not the wholesale synthesis of new information. The goal is to reveal the true structure to the eye based on actual measurements of the object. Second scientific imaging and social imaging have fundamentally different functions in terms of what they reveal about the world. The color of cloth has different meanings than the color of a distant nebula.
Then there is the issue of B&W movies. Using this kind of tech might not give pleasing results as the colors used for sets and outfits were chosen to work well for film contrast and not for story accuracy. That “blue” dress might really be green. (Please, just leave B&W movies the way they are.)