LoneSky

One of the goals of this project was to carefully colorize the famous photograph by social reformer Jacob Riis, taken circa 1900, so that it would have the appearance of a modern digital camera image. Mulberry St., New York, N.Y. courtesy Library of Congress . How naive I was. The results in this low resolution proof-of-concept, though more convincing than other colorized Mulberry Street examples I've seen, fall far short. The best I can say is that some parts of it look like old Kodachrome film. Mulberry Street colorized by LoneSky. I knew it would be tedious due to the astonishing amount of detail present in the image. I was not prepared for how difficult it would be to give it a convincingly modern look. The problem—one of the many difficulties of colorizing old photographs—is with the characteristic tone response of the original medium. Before 1906, commercial film was sensitive to just shorter wavelength light—blue and green. It even recorded some of the ultraviol...