[Krauze]

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[tayete]

Simply great!!!

It is incredible how colour can make an image loose the "old times" sense...
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[bearsclover]

Wow. Wow.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Most fascinating. I will peruse it at my leisure.
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Madness takes its toll - please have exact change.

[Godwin]

cool stuff

what the webmaster said is very true, the colours really make the pictures feel different from others of the same period, they make the photos come alive
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Derelict Studios|Godwin's Space

[jfrancis]

Those images were always in color. They were photographed 3 times, one time each through a red, green, and blue filter.

They were stored as 3 color separations (R, G, and B) on 3 black and white plates. They have been "colorized" by pulling out the old color separations, colorizing them, and combining them. That's why there is color fringing on all moving parts of the image (like water) -- because the color separations were taken at different times, and the moving objects are at different places from sep to sep.

It's the same concept as was used to make 3-strip Technicolor movies.

[Krauze]

ouch...and I thought... well... right.... you ruined my illusions, jfrancis
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[jfrancis]

Personally, I think it's even better that they are "real" -- and not carefully hand painted. It's even more amazing to look at them knowing they are a pretty fair representation of what things really looked like then.

You can find even more of the same mentioned here: http://eatpoo.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=21601&sid=f5f55916dc167fc09d3f42cf4ce9aac4

and the direct link is here:

http://www.gridenko.com/pg/

[Rychan]

That is a fantastic idea. Too bad someone didn't think of that earlier. It really changes your perspective to see it in color. It's like all of the color world war 2 video footage. It really connects you to the people involved. Makes you realize things weren't so different then.

[Krauze]

You are right - we actually have some pretty distorted impression of those days. Kind of almost always elegant, retouched.

I wonder how we will look to 22th century people: "hey look - they are flat! They`re not in 3D!!!"
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[Adamantine]

[Deathman]

the one who discovered this techique was a genius.

I thought it's a digital coloring of black and white photos. I Thought it was an awesome job of present day artists.... when I learned it's a photo technique in the early 1900s.... it's more amazing!

[Rychan]

actually there are some recent semi automatic techniques in the graphics community to do example based coloration. Hmm... let me see if I can try one out and see how it turns out on a single channel of these pictures. (the reason it can work is because texture and color are pretty closely correlated in natural images)

Regardless it's better to have the original color channels.

[Rychan]

[jfrancis]

Adamantine: Of course, the R G and B of your monitor are quite unlikely to be the R, G, and B of the original or reconstructing filters. In fact, read down through this guy's page to see a discussion of the difference between monitor phosphor green and a particular green filter he has.

http://www.skytopia.com/project/light/light.html

...although I applaud your actually testing the assertions, and you're right, there probably was some additional tweaking.

Hell, some have asserted that NASA doctors up the Mars photos for dramatic effect:

http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/mars-hiddencolors.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/29/wnasa29.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/01/29/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=27790

[aquamire]

The mars photos arent doctored for dramatic effect.

The cameras on the rovers arent ment to take pretty pictures in the normal visual spectrum. Theres a lot more data to be had from ultra-violet and infrared.

A lot of the pictures from nasa on the two rovers are actually taken in infrared, or through other filters to gain information about the composition of the soil and rocks.

It isnt some digital camera ccd that takes true color pictures. Rather, they have filters that are placed in front of the lense, sort of like how those old russian photos were taken. What gets sent to the press is only an approximation of the values in the human eyes color spectrum. Apparently, infrared is the closest they can get since it overlaps into the normal spectrum.

Most of the Hubble images out there are false color too. The hubble takes a lot of photos in parts of the spectrum that we simply cant see. The pretty colors in the photos are actual scientific data representing various elements by their wavelengths in certain parts of the spectrum.
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"Thursdays, I could never get the hang of Thursdays." - Arthur Dent

[Herb]

Jesus, this is beautiful:

Wow, I'm glad you shared this. This is so damn interesting! I'm also very interested in Russian history.

Thanks for sharing the Mars stuff aquamire, I spent 45 minutes sifting through tons of pages on it That's creepy seeing Mars look like Earth...
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[m703-324]

russian pictures are amazing... gives you the timemachine feeling

about the mars pictures... i wonder why noone started panicing and claiming that all these pictures are done in some desert on earth, after seeing those bluesky photos... and everything that comes after that, like nasas funds

btw autolevels in PS works well enough for those red pics