Old photos that look so... real

September 28, 2006 12:19 PM

I'm curious about OLD historical photos that are in color and have such accurate color rendition that they look like they could have been taken in the past few years.

I find that most photos older than 15-20 years old have washed out colors or some sort of unusual color palette shift. Even noteworthy pictures in magazines and coffee table books have this effect. My impression is that the vast majority of these pics in print and on the Web just get a cosmetic dab with hue & saturation shift, and that nothing gets serious treatment.

But every now and then on the Internet I see a old color photo that doesn't suffer from these artifacts.

In short, I'd really like to see examples of old pics online that look so lifelike (in terms of color quality) that it transports me back to that era like I'm standing in the scene. Does anyone know of examples that exist online? Some examples to get you started:

* VC-10 on the ramp in Sudan in 1966 -- not especially noteworthy but it's a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, and what prompted me to ask this question.

* Library of Congress Great Depression photos -- only a FEW of them seem to have accurate color. For example, this 1943 photo has sort of a technicolor look; you can tell something isn't right about it. On the other hand, this photo (also 1943) actually looks pretty good.

* Produkin-Gorskii collection - Color pics of Russia that are absolutely astounding for the time. The colors are not very accurate, but considering that some of these pics are 110 years old and they're very sharp, they're still jaw-dropping.

Thoughts?

posted by chef_boyardee to media & arts (9 comments total)

Kottke recently posted some color-corrected photos of America from 1939–1943.

"My goal was not to blow out the contrast or unnecessarily accentuate colors, but attempt to duplicate what these photos would look like had they been taken with a contemporary camera and processed using contemporary techniques and materials."

His page links to some other modern-looking historical color photography.
posted by mbrubeck at 12:24 PM on September 28, 2006

Probably because the good ones were taken with Kodachrome and printed properly. (Or you could just be looking at scans of the original Kodachrome slide. Kodachrome has at least 50 years of archival quality.
posted by Gungho at 12:31 PM on September 28, 2006

yeah, airliners.net is a great place for photos like that. also look at corbis and getty images, though you will of course have to pay for stock images.

I know of a few color photographs from world was ONE that are nothing short of stunning. unfortunately, the link is at home. I'll look once I get there.
posted by krautland at 1:10 PM on September 28, 2006

Wikipedia has an answer for you:

One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 1:12 PM on September 28, 2006

The Prokudin-Gorskii weren't printed in color at the time--that's a recent innovation. The original pictures were projected on a screen.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:16 PM on September 28, 2006

cite
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:17 PM on September 28, 2006

Gungho writes "Probably because the good ones were taken with Kodachrome and printed properly."

Kodachrome owes it's colour fastness to lack of colour couplers in the emulsion. Kodachromes are actually a sort of three part B&W process with the colour added at processing. Because there aren't any left over colour couplers the colours don't shift over time.
posted by Mitheral at 2:10 PM on September 28, 2006

Definitely looks like Kodachrome. The LOC site says (for the couple of photos I looked at) that the images were scanned from "transparency" (e.g. slide), and as far as I know Kodachrome was the only real game in town for color slide photography in those days.

I've personally seen a couple of Kodachromes from the sixties a few times. The color rendition and lack of degradation is really amazing. It's too bad the stuff's in the process of being phased out.
posted by neckro23 at 10:02 PM on September 28, 2006

If you are looking at photos on the net, then how they were digitized is a factor as well. Some scanning software has color correction for fading pigments built in. A number of articles on the fading of photographs can be found here.
posted by TedW at 5:33 AM on September 29, 2006