The art of hand-col­or­ing or tint­ing black and white pho­tographs has been around, the Vox video above explains, since the ear­li­est days of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. “But these didn’t end up look­ing super real­is­tic,” at least not next to their mod­ern coun­ter­parts, cre­at­ed with com­put­ers. Dig­i­tal col­oriza­tion “has made it pos­si­ble for artists to recon­struct images with far more accu­ra­cy.”

Accu­ra­cy, you say? How is it pos­si­ble to recon­struct col­or arrange­ments from the past when they have only been pre­served in black and white? Well, this requires research. “You now have a wealth of infor­ma­tion,” says Jor­dan Lloyd, a mas­ter dig­i­tal col­orist. “It’s just know­ing where to look.”

His­tor­i­cal adver­tise­ments, diaries, doc­u­ments, and the assess­ments of his­to­ri­ans and ethno­g­ra­phers, among oth­er resources, pro­vide enough data for a real­is­tic approx­i­ma­tion. Some con­jec­ture is involved, but when you see the amount of research that goes into deter­min­ing the col­ors of the past, you will most sure­ly be impressed.

This isn’t play­ing with fil­ters and set­tings in Pho­to­shop until the images look good—it’s using soft­ware to recre­ate what schol­ar­ship uncov­ers, the kind of dig­ging that turns up impor­tant his­tor­i­cal facts such as the orig­i­nal red-on-black logo of 7Up, or the fact that the Eif­fel tow­er was paint­ed a col­or called “Venet­ian red” dur­ing its con­struc­tion.

Unless we know this col­or his­to­ry, we might be inclined to think col­orized pho­tographs that get it right are wrong. How­ev­er, the aim of mod­ern col­oriz­ers is not only to make the past seem more imme­di­ate to us in the present; they also attempt to restore the col­ors peo­ple saw when pho­tographs from the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies were tak­en.

The soft­ware may not dic­tate col­or, but it still plays an indis­pens­able role in how alive dig­i­tal­ly col­orized pho­tographs appear. Col­oriz­ers first use it to remove blem­ish­es, scratch­es, and the signs of age. Then they blend hun­dreds of lay­ers of col­ors. It’s a lit­tle like mak­ing a dig­i­tal oil paint­ing. Human skin can have up to 20 lay­ers of col­ors, rang­ing from pinks, to yel­lows, to blues.

With­out “an intu­itive under­stand­ing of how light works in the atmos­phere,” how­ev­er, these artists would fail to per­suade us. Col­or is pro­duced by light, as we know, and light is con­di­tioned by lev­els of arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al light blend­ing in a space, by atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions and time of day. Dif­fer­ent sur­faces reflect light dif­fer­ent­ly. Cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ing these con­di­tions in a mono­chro­mat­ic pho­to­graph is the key to “achiev­ing pho­to­re­al­ism.”

Crit­ics of col­oriza­tion treat it like a form of van­dal­ism, but as Lloyd points out, the process is not meant to sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal arti­facts, but to sup­ple­ment them. The col­orized pho­tos we see in the video and at the links below are of images in the pub­lic domain, avail­able to use and reuse for any pur­pose. Col­oriza­tion artists have found their pur­pose in mak­ing the past seem far less like a dis­tant coun­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

The Open­ing of King Tut’s Tomb, Shown in Stun­ning Col­orized Pho­tos (1923–5)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When we visu­al­ize the Great Depres­sion, we think first of one woman: Native Amer­i­can migrant work­er Flo­rence Owens Thomp­son. Few of us know her name, though near­ly all of us know her face. For that we have anoth­er woman to thank: the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dorothea Lange who dur­ing the Depres­sion was work­ing for the Unit­ed States fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, specif­i­cal­ly the Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion, on “a project that would involve doc­u­ment­ing poor rur­al work­ers in a pro­pa­gan­da effort to elic­it polit­i­cal sup­port for gov­ern­ment aid.”

That’s how Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, puts it in a video essay on Lange’s famous 1936 pho­to of Thomp­son, Migrant Moth­er. (For best results, view the video below on a phone or tablet rather than on a stan­dard com­put­er screen.) Reach­ing the migrant work­ers’ camp in Nipo­mo, Cal­i­for­nia where Thomp­son and her chil­dren were stay­ing toward the end of anoth­er long day of pho­tog­ra­phy, Lange at first passed it by.

Only about twen­ty miles lat­er did she decide to turn the car around and see what mate­r­i­al the 2,500 to 3,500 “pea pick­ers” there might offer. She stayed only ten min­utes, but in that time cap­tured what Puschak calls the pho­to­graph that “came to define the Depres­sion in the Amer­i­can con­scious­ness” — it even heads the Great Depres­sion’s Wikipedia page — and “became the arche­typ­al image of strug­gling fam­i­lies in any era.”

Over time, Migrant Moth­er has also become “one of the most icon­ic pic­tures in the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy.” But Lange did­n’t get it right away: it was actu­al­ly the sixth por­trait she took of Thomp­son, each one more pow­er­ful (and more able to “evoke sym­pa­thy from vot­ers that would trans­late into polit­i­cal sup­port”) than the last. Puschak takes us through each of these, mark­ing the changes in com­po­si­tion that led to the pho­to­graph we can all call to mind imme­di­ate­ly. “A less­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er would have milked the chil­dren’s faces for their sym­pa­thet­ic poten­tial,” for instance, but hav­ing them turn away “com­mu­ni­cates that mes­sage of fam­i­ly” with­out “tak­ing away from the cen­tral face, or the eyes, which seem at last to let down their guard as they search the dis­tance and wor­ry.”

These and oth­er active­ly made choic­es (includ­ing the removal of Thomp­son’s dis­tract­ing left thumb in the dark­room) mean that “there is very lit­tle spon­ta­neous in this icon­ic image of so-called doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy,” but “whether that dimin­ish­es its pow­er is up to you. For me, being able to actu­al­ly see the steps of Lange’s craft enhances her work.” What­ev­er Lange’s process, the prod­uct defined an era, and upon pub­li­ca­tion con­vinced the gov­ern­ment to send 20,000 pounds of food to Nipo­mo — though by that point Thomp­son her­self, who ulti­mate­ly suc­ceed­ed in pro­vid­ing for her fam­i­ly and lived to the age of 80, had moved on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

Found: Lost Great Depres­sion Pho­tos Cap­tur­ing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

The Cap­ti­vat­ing Sto­ry Behind the Mak­ing of Ansel Adams’ Most Famous Pho­to­graph, Moon­rise, Her­nan­dez, New Mex­i­co

“A Great Day in Harlem,” Art Kane’s Icon­ic Pho­to of 57 Jazz Leg­ends, Cel­e­brates Its 60th Anniver­sary

Edward Hopper’s Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.