Is using black and white photos for colour reference viable?

[old thumper]

I don't believe it is possible to rely on b&w pictures for colour reference, but am I wrong?

I list three examples of what I mean.

Certain types of b&w film show red as being darker than blue making British roundels appear as being French.

Shadows etc can make an aircraft appear to have a camouflage pattern when there is none.

Wear to paintwork can also be mistaken for camouflage.

Could anyone tell me whether it is possible to discern features such as red or blue painted spinners from olive drab?

My reason for asking is that I am looking at old b&w photos of olive drab painted P-38s in North Africa 1942/3, while the pictures themselves show little indication of different coloured spinners etc the artists drawings that I have seen mostly show the spinners as being painted a medium blue (or on occasion red) often with a tail stripe of the same colour.

[Rob G]

Can o'worms there... for all the reasons you list, I'd say 'educated guess' is the closest anyone will ever come, unless they know the film type, the development chemicals, strengths and times, what paper the original was printed on, exposure time, chemicals and development times again, AND what, if any, special treatment the print had ie dodging or burning areas of light and dark to bring out or hide detail/add contrast etc. And that's just on the original - once it gets beyond the original print, anything can and does happen to it.

As part of an informed workflow, using memoirs, squadron histories, combat reports etc then yes, b/w photos are useful guides as to colour shapes and positions (assuming a good quality print with known provenance). But making definitive colour calls from them is, to my mind, fraught with danger. No doubt others will disagree.

[Beardie]

I had always wondered about this myself but I am guessing as stated above that it is generally best guess along with eye witness accounts and references garnered from the men who flew and serviced the aircraft which even in itself can obviously be erroneous as I would imagine that, if a pilot flew more than one of a particular type, he might not neccessarily have the same details on each of the aircraft and may be confused as to which machine bore which distinctive markings.

[Graham Boak]

If you know you are working from a limited palette (e.g. RAF camouflage colours in 1940) then you can make reasonable estimates, but detail such as propeller spinners which could be anything - no. In the example you mention, all fighters in the theatre should have had red spinners, which was a specified identity feature together with the fin flash. On ortho film, which the UK used quite a lot, then red would appear much darker than OD, the yellow would also appear dark and the blue light. That's not true for panchromatic film which appears to have been the normal for US photographers. Those are the kind of hints that you can look for even on a b&w print, but in this case probably not a lot of help. If there's good evidence of different colours in use then I'd look to the US habit of different colours for different flights, particularly given the comment about a tail band.

[JohnT]

I read an interesting article on colourblindness in which the author noted that there is no guarantee that when several people stand together looking at a colour that their brain "reads," the same tones anyway

My pal at school had a brown colour jacket he saw as green

[Troy Smith]

I don't believe it is possible to rely on b&w pictures for colour reference, but am I wrong?

I list three examples of what I mean.

Certain types of b&w film show red as being darker than blue making British roundels appear as being French.

Shadows etc can make an aircraft appear to have a camouflage pattern when there is none.

Wear to paintwork can also be mistaken for camouflage.

Could anyone tell me whether it is possible to discern features such as red or blue painted spinners from olive drab?

My reason for asking is that I am looking at old b&w photos of olive drab painted P-38s in North Africa 1942/3, while the pictures themselves show little indication of different coloured spinners etc the artists drawings that I have seen mostly show the spinners as being painted a medium blue (or on occasion red) often with a tail stripe of the same colour.

In short. No.

(there is a famous researcher who says you can though...)

profiles may have been drawn with supplied information, or may just look nice.

There was a good link in a similar thread. found it

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234939571-rlm83/page-3#entry1701997

http://photo.net/black-and-white-photo-film-processing-forum/00bPNU

[Dana Bell]

Hi Thumper,

If the color is completely unknown, but you have a good idea of the film used and a decent guess about any filters used, a black and white image can help you make a wild guess about the colors used.

But if the colors have to be one of only two or three options, any photos might help you eliminate possibilities. For example, Glossy Sea Blue F4U-1Ds could have Glossy Sea Blue or Light Gray wheel wells - a photo of an inverted Corsair with light toned wells should be showing Light Gray. But if you believe the aircraft could have used Interior Green wells (they shouldn't have), that image does nothing for you. It all depends on what is "known" before the image is examined.

Cheers,

Dana

[robvulcan]

[Nick Millman]

It has been done with little reservation by the WWI fraternity for decades but it is absolutely forbidden for subsequent eras where one is required to worship at the altar of colour photography instead. Both are false idols.

In the original question there is a potential clash of squadron colours and theatre colours to explore which would prove much more interesting.

Squadron recognition colours of red, white, yellow and blue were promulgated in June 1941 and seem to have survived through the war but the red spinner theatre marking seems to have taken precedence. Without checking, are there any orders and dates for that? The aircraft numbers are usually the clue to the squadron identity.

Nick

[Dave Fleming]

You only need to look at all the fuss about that dress to see how people view colours - I saw white/gold, my wife blue/black - from the same photo at the same time.

[rav]

If we had a set of photos taken with three filters (e.g. Red, Green, Blue) we could guess the real colours. I don't know if we were that lucky in case of any WW2 subject, but I have seen some aircraft photographed with two different filters (or film types, which makes no difference IMO). You cannot 100% surely guess the real colours out of two pictures, but that's better than one, isn't it?

Every colour picture is composed of such three filtered BW images:

You can observe "French roundels", white sky and darkened yellow when using blue filter. With red filter the sky is dark and Dull Red is light. Keeping such observations in mind and matching them to a photo (or a set of photos) you are analyzing, you can guess the filter used to take the picture and assign to some of the grey tones probable real colours.

[Black Knight]

Thats an easy example; but in real B&W photography of the time, it was common to use light yellow, pale orange and even pale green filters on the lens. These give very subtle tonal variations.

Color film negatives use yellow, cyan and magenta, not red/blue/green. Digital colour cannot be directly compared to film negatives.

[ben_m]

(or film types, which makes no difference IMO)

Most films today are panchromatic, but in WW2 there was still a range of sensitivity types in use, from blue-sensitive to panchromatic. The film's sensitivity curve can have just the same influence a strong filter can, see the curves in this book:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9oLOAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA261#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Edgar]

Yet again we come up against 21st Century thinking, which cannot be applied to 1940s (wartime) Britain. You didn't have camera shops all over town; if you were lucky you might find cameras and film in your local chemist, who would very often do the developing and printing for you (so you had no choice how they looked.)

Filters? Don't be daft, it wasn't normally possible to buy a lenshood, and the predominant film was 620 rollfilm, and you made every shot count, since it was so hard to find. Even Charles E Brown tried to use only one shot of (imported) Kodachrome on each subject.

If you did your own processing, you had to buy chemicals from the same chemist and mix your own; prints for printing had to be on glossy paper, which deepened the contrast.

You also had to decide how to expose and develop the film; while one friend did scenic photos, so gave his film extra development and therefore contrast, I did portraits, which needed over-exposure (of the film) and a cut in development time, which lowered contrast. The same system was needed for wedding photos, to get detail in the white wedding dress, while avoiding having a groom looking as if he was carved out of ebony.

And, yes, speed of film did make a difference, as did the grade of paper on which it was printed, development time and temperature (of both.) Some paper was actually brown (sepia,) and when transferred to black and white, all sorts of fun could ensue.

The short answer is, no, you can't tell colour from black and white photos, and anyone, who tells you he can, is conning you.

[ben_m]

Yet again we come up against 21st Century thinking, which cannot be applied to 1940s (wartime) Britain. You didn't have camera shops all over town; if you were lucky you might find cameras and film in your local chemist,

Sounds exactly like my 21st Century town- no camera shops here, and even the biggest chemist only has a choice of two films.

[brewerjerry]

Hi

some time ago an aviation programme showed a US dept ( NASA ? ) that had a computer program that would convert an original b & w print into colour, they did a P-51 photo.

would be nice if there was one publicly available

cheers

jerry

[old thumper]

It has been done with little reservation by the WWI fraternity for decades but it is absolutely forbidden for subsequent eras where one is required to worship at the altar of colour photography instead. Both are false idols.

In the original question there is a potential clash of squadron colours and theatre colours to explore which would prove much more interesting.

Squadron recognition colours of red, white, yellow and blue were promulgated in June 1941 and seem to have survived through the war but the red spinner theatre marking seems to have taken precedence. Without checking, are there any orders and dates for that? The aircraft numbers are usually the clue to the squadron identity.

Nick

Yes the squadron numbers go up in batches of 30 for each of the three squadrons in the group. I am not at all sure if the P-38s that arrived around the time of torch would of had theatre markings, they were originally part of the 8th Air Force and arrived in North Africa via Gibraltar.

[Dave Fleming]

Even colour photos can't be taken as reliable, for example, have al look at this - Was one of the NImrod AEW3s painted a darker colour than the others?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22790934@N07/16341210249/

Nope, it just happened to be under a cloud at that point!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22790934@N07/16527513255/

[occa]

A good color photo can tell more than a good B/W pic, how can that be denied even ?

I don't get it.

Of course there a lots of color photos that are unreliable but to draw a dogma out of this is a bit odd.

Just my 0,02 $ ... no fight intended lol ...

[galgos]

My father was a keen amateur photographer when he was training in Rhodesia, 1943. He managed to get a very limited supply of film and did his own developing, this yellow and black Fairey Battle looks very far from its actual colours though in B&W!

Max

[garryrussell]

Colour photos are not a reliable source...B+W are really a none starter, too many variable with film type, filters etc.

[Giorgio N]

Even a BW picture can help in understanding something, at least as long as you have to choose from a limited number of colours and know as much as possible about the colours used (or supposed to be used) on the particular subject you're looking at. Clearly you can't tell red from blue on the picture of a spinner in isolation, however if you have a picture of say an RAF spitfire, it's possible to guess if roundel blue or red were used on the spinner by comparing with the tones on the roundel. However, as others have said before, this works if the colours from which you can choose are limited. If a non standard colour is used, then things can be difficult.

Personally I still use BW pictures to try and understand details, of course backed with as many information about colour schemes, regulations, unit traditions and so on. The conclusions I draw may still be wrong, but they'll be the result of an educated guess instead of wild guesses

[Graham Boak]

Let's not forget that many of the aircraft photos we look at, particularly the higher quality ones, were not taken by amateur enthusiasts but by professionals employed by the services. However short public supplies were in wartime, it is wrong to argue that these people did not have access to all the paraphernalia of prewar professional photographers, and that does include coloured filters. Therefore the possible effect of these does need to be considered when attempting to make judgements from b&w photos. Even amateur photographers would still have access to any of their prewar equipment.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the majority of aircraft were in standard colours, and the majority of photos taken show much the same appearance (with all due allowance for comments above), so it is generally a pretty safe bet that another photo of a similar type (same air force, same timescale) with the same appearance will be showing an aircraft in standard colours. Moving beyond that is where it gets interesting. Anyone looking for absolutes at either extreme is on shaky ground.

To keep things in context, consider how many models we could make if we could only recreate aircraft (say pre-1960) for which high quality colour photographs existed.

Edited March 2, 2015 by Graham Boak

[MilneBay]

For most military aircraft the colours are determined by production directives so of course B/W photos can be used as we are already aware of what the basic schemes should be. As a further aid in using B/W the differences between the effects of orthochrome and other film can also be factored in. So to dismiss B/W with a blanket no is incorrect. Also we are aware of theatre markings etc. where the colours are also known because they were officially prescribed then we can accept that on B/W film as a pretty sound reference. So the use of B/W photos is not a completely futile exercise.

[PFlint]

I think Giorgio N summed it up well.

a B&W shot as the only form of evidence is not going to tell you anything about color

however, with a bunch of other information it can help you reduce the number of guesses

100% certainty can only be achieved with a physical sample subjected to chemical and other forms of scientific examination

and then reproduced exactly with a new batch of paint mixed exactly as the original.