Some old images brought to life...

[Mark Kerr]

For our recent Nurses' League reunion (Kent and Canterbury Hospital) I colourised some of the more familiar images using the free online tool at www.colourise.sg - the effects were startlingly good, bring a real sense of life to very familiar group photos. There's a discussion to be had about messing with history and 'true' pictures, but the consensus was that it made 100-year old images come alive, and certainly made the old staff seem 'real'. Have a play online, see what you think... they are slightly pixellated as I've had to make the file size to teeny due to the limits on images here - the high res images are really quite impressive.

[myk1066]

Personally I think adding colour is a great idea as long as the original is retained, it does bring the picture to life.

[myk1066]

How do you choose the colours?

[backman]

Having seen Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" when it came out  I could not believe the difference that Colourisation made to familiar images. These nursing images, if sympathetically done  like these, bring the characters somehow to life. I had considered having a go myself but fear it may be added to my ever increasing to do list. Well done Mark.

[wilfb]

Hi.

Well! I'd vote for that!  As long as, as myk points out, the original is not lost.

As one who loves tinkering about with photographs I would give these an A1 all the way.  As peter says, well done Mark!

Will.

PS. I wonder if it is possible to obtain the use of the colourised image for use in a future SoN News Page?

[wilfb]

Hello again...

Being unable to resist, I blew up the original from Peter's upload to 2000x110px without serious loss of definition - and if I had known the people, could have named every one easily!

There were a couple of non-coursed bald heads (!) gentlemen - and I did wonder about ? Matron's dog. Superb...

[Mark Kerr]

The amazingly colourized WW1 film was done properly, frame by frame, but the tool I've linked to just uses an algorithm trained on hundreds of thousands of images from the Singapore State Archive (they funded tis tech project) as well as the same number again from the New York Public Library. No choice by us users, so most dresses end up blue or red, and they only aim to be 'plausible' colours, not of course the actual ones... but it gets face and flesh tones pretty well, gives most nurse and military uniforms a pretty close hit too. If you're determined you could then work on an image further in Photoshop, but for a one-click conversion it's a good 8 out of 10.

[Mark Kerr]

Wilfb: happy to send you the batch I used... and a few others from the archive, including Nusing School images of course... where can I send it, editing them down to get under the limit on here degrades them a bit too much, is there an email or upload site? Cheers, Mark

[wilfb]

Hi Mark,

That sounds great - any/all to:-

webmaster@schoolsofnursing.co.uk

I will feedback on status.  A private note via messages herein in a few minutes.

Very Best.
Will.