Colorizing vintage photos can be fun,

Colorizing vintage photos can be fun, especially when as a child, you loved coloring books.  That's me.  High resolution scans of well-preserved vintage photos create every opportunity to engage in some creative liberties in balancing colors.  But for less than ideal conditions, many provide avenues for creating details that are only hinted at or simply non-existent.  My aim is a realistic pleasing outcome, not to restore the photo, but to re-create a possible reality behind the photo and make it come alive. I colorize not to make an old faded b&w photo look like an old faded color photo.  I colorize as if I used my Sony Cybershot high res camera to go back in time and capture all the vibrant colors of a person, thing, or event, and bring the shots back to the present. Sometimes, it can't be done and some details will have to be imagined.

Some purists frown on colorization work as it robs the vintage photo subject of its aged origins.  So why even bother.  A vintage photo, whether a portrait, an event or a still life is always an historic record and preserving in its original condition is always a noble objective.

No problem with this noble objective.  But my colorization objective has nothing to do with noble historic objectives, but involves an artistic and creative one. Vintage photos of my childhood years (circa early 1960s) have turned sepia toned and faded (both b&W and colored) thanks on the amateur Kodak camera my parents had.  No matter how carefully they were stored ( in albums stashed on a shelf or closet), they always fade. When I look at them, I get nostalgic reliving in my mind those days.  Unfortunately, my recollection of those moments were not in Sepia or B&W. They are always in living color.  My clothes, school uniform,  the mint green house paint, my mom's baby blue dress, my yellow rubber ducky, a red Matchbox Pontiac, etc.

That's what I want to recreate, a living past full of vibrant colors the way life was and is.  So the purists can keep their historic vintage photos but I prefer to colorize the past.  They are not meant to restore the photo (though I do that prior to or while colorizing, removing speckles, crease marks, etc.) but to re-create the living reality captured by those aged photos.  I would liken it to going back in time taking my Sony Digicam with 20 megapixel ability to take a photo of, say, Abe Lincoln, or Winston Churchill.  In many cases where details have become obscure, I create them, thanks to online research.  For instance, when you colorize a 1952 picture with someone drinking a bottle of Coke that has become a mere blot or shadow on the photo, you just look for a 1950s coke bottle online and paste it in the colorized photo in the right orientation and lighting. It's a simple as that.  Though the technicality is not as simple as it sounds