Photo Interactive: The Civil War, Now in Living Color
How one author adds actual blues and grays to historic photographs
- By Ryan R. Reed
- Smithsonian.com, February 22, 2013
(Courtesy of Prints & Photographs, Library of Congress)
When you were colorizing the photos how did you know which colors to use? How much research went into finding Robert E. Lee’s hair color?
Things such as uniforms were pretty readily apparent and I could look at real uniforms preserved from that time. Things like women’s clothing I had to do research on to realize how vivid the color were at that time, what colors might be appropriate for that time and what colors could not be duplicated by dyes at the time. As far as physical characteristics of major people in the war, I did a huge amount of research online to try and find out accurate hair and eye colors. In many cases there were conflicting answers to things like that, which I then would do further research to try and get a consensus.
How did you actually go about applying color to the photographs and how long did it typically take to colorize one photo?
Some were quite simple. Portraits would probably be the most simple because there’s not a huge amount of detail on those. Eye color, hair color, things of that sort but nothing like wide vistas that have hundreds of people in them. The most I was ever able to achieve was about 3-and-a-half-portraits per day. The basic program that I used was Photoshop. What made this a really workable project to do is the incredible detail that these original photographs or duplicate photographs had been scanned at by Library of Congress.
Many of these photographs were stereoview cards so when they were looked at through a stereopticon they were actually 3-D, almost like our equivalent of View-Master images. An 8 x 10 negative would have two side-by-side images so each was approximately 4-to-4-and-a-half-inches wide. Believe it or not, Library of Congress has scanned those photos at up to 4,000 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. [At that high quality], it is then possible to move further and further in and colorize minutia that is just astounding. I developed a few little ways to do it that could minimize the process but each photo was different. The complexity of the colorizing process was directly proportionate to the complexity of the photograph itself.
Comments (7)
There is no blood because the body had been moved and setup up for photographing. This is the same soldier that is portrayed in the Confederate Sniper Devil Den photo.
Posted by Christopher on April 29,2013 | 11:53 AM
Fantastic job! They look like they could have been taken yesterday. Really brings the period to life.
Posted by Jim Bonnett on March 2,2013 | 12:11 PM
I totally agree with Ms. Hummel.
Posted by Terry Brasko on February 27,2013 | 08:04 AM
As a civil war enthusiast and professional artist, I'm immensely disappointed with these- and with the fact that the Smithsonian is highlighting the work. I appreciate the philosophy behind the colorized photos and the amount of work that must have gone into this book, but the efforts are regrettable by industry standards. Colorizing black and white photos is a tedious process, yes, but it requires an intimate knowledge of the subtlety of color that Guntzelman clearly isn't employing. There's no account for light temperature, for colour variation in any of the subjects- you can't just jump into Photoshop and set a green layer to "color" and expect those trees to look realistic. Real colour is far more subtle than what he's achieved, and these just end up looking like poor Victorian colorizations than anything like true, colour photography. Love the idea and I ABSOLUTELY commend the author for his efforts, but I feel like a man with cinematography and difecting credits should have a better eye for something beyond local color. -Claire Hummel
Posted by Claire Hummel on February 25,2013 | 05:21 PM
Truly amazing! Thank you.
Posted by Mari on February 24,2013 | 09:50 PM
Absolutely incredible...
Posted by Kathy P on February 24,2013 | 11:34 AM
as a history and civil war fan, these are just great for a true feeling of the war and the people of that time frame, would be excited to see more and think would help us get a better idea of the scope and depth of the battlefields,people and clothes of this era's great man and woman
Posted by john griffith on February 22,2013 | 03:12 PM