[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

As Dan knows, when someone starts to colorize a photo, it gets my dander up. It's a guess as to what the actual colors should be. Perhaps it is based on general data where actual color photos exist, but that certainly can't be the case for all of the color profiles that now seem to be an "essential" part of a book. Frankly, I look at these as wasted pages. Yes, modelers may eat them up, but they are ignoring the likelihood that these are some artist's best guess. When multiple color profiles of some famous pilots are produced in different books, it is amusing to see the differences. And, even when a good black and white side view photo is offered, it is mind boggling that the artist's color profile fails to match the patterns seen. Guys, it is artistry, not necessarily fact.

If you colorize a photo and publish it, you are turning fiction into fact from which others will claim now we know what such and such actually looked like. How are you to distinguish between actual color photos and the fakes? You are creating history, not reporting it, and that is very dangerous.

Case in point. Norman Malayney got pretty peeved at people lifting his stuff off of the Internet and publishing it without getting any permission to do so. So, he pulled a rather nasty trick. He implanted false information on a website to see if he could definitively track someone doing this. And, sure enough, he caught a big fish. The author was furious that his work was now tainted and that tainting would likely be copied by other authors. Pandora's box was open and could never be closed. The same holds true for colorizing black and white photos.

Now, I do take exception to the purist that wants to keep a photo as it was printed and, if the negative or photo became scratched, so be it, as this is history and should remain inviolate. To which, I say, bs. Maybe that snap of the Wright Flyer taking off for the first time should follow this dictum. The photo, itself, is iconic. But, one must remember that very different prints can result from the same negative. In the wet process, the type of paper is very important. Just how long was the exposure from the enlarger? Did the photo processor leave the paper in the developer too long before fixing it? Were the chemicals fresh? Was the photo fully rinsed before drying? If you are talking original photos from the WW II era, then this is the process by which they were printed.

But, going back to the negative, itself, it may have been under or over exposed. Or the subject matter contains both very bright and very dark material. Until the advent of the Photoshop era, normal processing had its limitations. Ironically, though, a really high contrast photo may actually contain information not seeable by the human eye. Scanning such a photo and working it with Photoshop can bring out this detail, information that would otherwise remain lost. What is thus being provided is more information - factual information - and the effort to do so is well justified, in contrast to colorization or painting a mustache on a face when there was none to start with.

Working with a professional photographer, we've been enhancing photos for years, with superb results.

Regards,
Richard