Putting colour on a monochrome photograph or film

Hand tinting was paid work from the 1840s until the middle of the twentieth century, done with fine brushes and pigment by studio colourists, many of them women taking piecework at home. The industrial colourising that Turner Entertainment ordered from 1986 was already computer assisted and drew objections from directors about altering a finished work rather than about the labour. Since the release of DeOldify in 2018 the operation has been free, immediate and applied to whole archives at a scale no workshop could reach. What a network supplies is a plausible colour, not the true one. Knowing what shade a uniform, a wall or a skin actually was takes research, and presenting a guess as a record of the past is a claim someone has to stand behind.