Recently, it has become fashionable to color black and white old films. This fashion came to Russia quite recently, and abroad the technology of "coloring" has already been worked out and put on stream.
The first colored film appeared long before the advent of computers - it was the painting "Battleship Potemkin", 1925. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein painted the red banner with his own hands in the final scene of the film.
Today the technology of coloring black and white films has gone far ahead, although many works are still monotonous and are done by hand. In the 90s of the XX century, special programs appeared - graphic editors, for example Photoshop, which significantly simplified the coloring technology.
The coloring process is as follows: the film is digitized and divided into separate frames. If a picture is taken on film, it is scanned using special scanners, then restored: stains are removed, damaged parts are restored, the picture is leveled. Some frames have to be created almost from scratch using a computer.
Divided into separate frames, the film is divided into scenes and color matching begins. So that the picture does not lose its individuality, they invite eyewitnesses of the filming, specialists in costumes, awards, interiors, who can remember or recreate the real colors of costumes and decorations. They find color photographs of the filming process, real interiors, costumes, carry out historical examinations. Sometimes, for the most accurate result, they create several options for color combinations and, with the help of consultants, choose the best one.
From all scenes of the film, key frames are selected, which are hand-painted by experienced artists, they will serve as samples for subsequent work. Further actions can be performed by less experienced artists, their work resembles the work with children's coloring. Each frame of the film (there are 24 such frames in each second) is colored manually on a computer. Special programs make the work somewhat easier, but most of the work is done using routine painting. That is why color restoration works take so much time - for example, it took more than 3 years for the film "Seventeen Moments of Spring" to play with colors.
