Oh, Mom...

[Jay 2K Winger]

My mother, bless her, is not very good with technology. She realizes this, and it frustrates her, and it's been the source of much frustration and humor for those of us related to her.

This particular story came up the other night at dinner, when we were discussing the new printer I bought a while back, but haven't hooked up yet. (Our current printer still has ink left, and we're just going to use it up before swapping out.) The new one has a scanner built in, and Mom's planning to use it to scan our old photos and put them online, as part of her genealogy research, etc.

Then she said, "Maybe we could colorize those old photos, too."

Cue the from me and my dad.

J2K: "...how would you do that, exactly?"
Mom: "Just add color to it."
J2K: "Based on what?"
Mom: "What?"
J2K: "How would you know how to colorize it?"
Mom: "Well, I'd need to learn--"
J2K: "I mean, how would you know what the colors are?"

Dad has been chiming in with statements supporting my questions, but Mom is still confused.

Mom: "They colorize old movies all the time."
Dad: "Yes, but it takes a great deal of time and money to do it, they have to colorize every frame."

At this point, I get up, and pick up an old B&W photo from our shelf and show it to Mom.

J2K: "How would you colorize this? Do you know what the colors are?"
Mom: "Well, no."
J2K: "Exactly."

Fortunately, she seemed to get what Dad and I were telling her at that point, so we didn't have to continue to try to hammer the point home.

Anyone else have some stories dealing with their parents or relatives having a brain burp moment?

[Can I Help Your A$$?]

Colorizing movies doesn't mean you have to know what the colors were; in fact, many black and white movies were made with some really freaky colors and makeup so that the b&w would come out right. If you colorized a lot of movies based on, say, color photos from the set, it would be very strange indeed.

[Andara Bledin]

If you colorized a lot of movies based on, say, color photos from the set, it would be very strange indeed.

Oh, yes. Especially when you consider that Hitchcock would do stuff like use chocolate syrup for blood...

^-.-^

[wraiths_crono]

I have heard tho there is a way that B/W photos can be colored tho, takes a nice computer and usually a print studio to do tho..

[Mondestrucken]

I know that in the movie Jezebel, Bette Davis's infamous red dress (if you ever saw the movie, you'll immediately know which dress, it was an important plot point) was actually hunter green. It just looked more red in B&W than red did, if that makes sense.

[MoonCat]

Yeah, I kind of thought she was just assuming you could put in whatever colors you want.

[Jay 2K Winger]

My Mom is known for making technological mistakes now and then. If I took the time and didn't mind killing my brain cells recalling some of them, I could make a whole thread in Unsupportable about her. This is a woman whose relationship with computers led to the following exchange fairly often:

J2K: *comes home from work*
Mom: "The computer's not working again."
J2K: "(sigh) You sat in front of it again, didn't you?"

Mom now has a Macbook which we got her, because Macs are user-friendly and virtually glitch-free. ...Ha, of course, this is my Mom we're talking about. She's a Walking Techbane. She hasn't gotten a virus or anything, but she'll try to open some slideshow file a friend IM'd her, and end up locking up her whole computer.

[Teskeria]

In most of the black and white movies, they used the same material for a lot of the costumes. so if you actually saw it in the colors it was filmed in, a lot of the cast would be wearing identical colors.

[telecom_goddess]

I've seen colorized photos on magazine covers before....I would think you could just guess at colors really and have fun with it...who really remembers what the colors were back then anyway?

[georgie]

i have a very old black and white photo of my dad taken when he was about 18

my brother loves playing with programs on his computer and he found something that adds colours to photos.

so fiddled around for ages and then sent me that old pic of dad that he'd changed from b&w to a glorious colour.

[SongsOfDragons]

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/201...ntury_ago.html

Here's a fantastic way of colouring black-and-white photos...it required a special camera and was done there and then, but the results are wonderful