Colour Luftwaffe Guncamera Footage

[ChrisMAg2]

Originally Posted by Etienne

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Christian, on what grounds do you say this footage is colorised?.........I cannot belive that someone would go to all that trouble to colorise archive footage!
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Etienne,
if you carefully look at the movies, you will notice there are actually only two "colors" visible, plus a gray variety. A real color footage would show a very broader range of colors, even if downgraded to web-quality.

I.e. the fuselage of the Ju 88 (should be two-tone green) is actualy plain two-tone grey. The undersurface is not light blue (like the sky) but just light grey or white. The pilot is just sepia-yellow in different shades.

I didn't want to say the images are bad, on the contrary. But to somebody who specialises in color (me!), i would want to put emphasis on this "distinction". I am also always interessted to see real color footage, but feel disappointed, if they turn out to be "just colorised". That's why I made that comment.
I hope I didn't offend anybody with my comments and would want to apologize if I did so.

[George Hopp]

Thank you for that, Christian.
George

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by ChrisMAg2

Etienne,
if you carefully look at the movies, you will notice there are actually only two "colors" visible, plus a gray variety. A real color footage would show a very broader range of colors, even if downgraded to web-quality.

I certainly won't argue with someone who actually knows about this stuff, I'd just observe that a lot of photography and movies (Hollywood included) from the 1930s and 40s has this kind of look. I have a DVD "America's War in Colour" and there is a sequence where the colour values suddenly become "modern" and the contrast with what went before is quite startling.

Is some of the variation because different colour processes were being used, perhaps?

[ChrisMAg2]

Nick, I'm not quite sure if realy got, what you mean, but IMO the reason for your observation cannot be fixed on just one explanation. Actualy this can or might happen
•if parts of the reel was even just exposed differently from the rest
•if different batches of film are mounted together and then processed together
•if one of the reels underwent a differnt dev-process
•if something was changed on the entire copying process.
and/ or any combination of the upper mentioned.
It is almost impossible to specify, what actualy caused a change in color, unfortunaly! There are just too many posssibilities

@Etienne,
yes, those are real color photos. The reason for their effect is a partial fading/ desintigrating of parts of one or more color layer(s). This is very typical effect for (wartime) color material. This is not nessecarely due to age. Mostly it happened due to it's compostion and processing. Effects of age are a bit different. But that's a differnt story....