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Comment by mnl | Hacker News Reader

I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there.

I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.

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There's a big difference between a colorized movie and historical film that's been colorized.

The movie represents a directors vision, and how it looked in B&W was part of that vision. I agree, they should not colorize old movies.

But historical films are in B&W because that's all they had, not because they wanted to depict it that way. I'm sure if the creators of those films had the option of 4K HDR, they would have used it.

The historical films also represent the directors' vision, as they had to choose the lens/film/exposure/processing to interpret the image and get their message across. 4K HDR would just gives them more knobs to tweak. A documentary has less control over what happens in front of the camera, but the whole workflow behind the camera is still completely under the directors' control.

I'm sure they would have, too, but they didn't and adding pseudo-information to the result isn't going to improve much even if it is prettier.

> If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. (...) If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W.

So the colorized versions are a Fantasy, but the original b/w versions were already a Fantasy.

If we're looking at colorized feature films, everything is a fantasy of course. The cinematography used various colors to get the desired look on black and white film, in some cases to evoke various percieved colors with totally different colors.

When colorizing, sometimes they have color photos from the filming. You can try to match those, but that may not match the intent of the film. But you might not know the intent either, so you have to guess at that too. It might be easier to convince people to watch colorized films, but it's important to realize it's not really the same film.

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