How did the color photos of the late Qing Dynasty come from?

"Are there any color photos at that time in the late Qing Dynasty? Bian Xiao, are you kidding? " Every time the old color photos of the late Qing Dynasty are released, there are always netizens who leave messages expressing doubts.

In fact, the questioning of netizens is justified. There was no color film and related photography in the late Qing Dynasty, but photo studios and photographers at that time did take many color photos for customers.

What's the mystery? Let's talk about this today. First of all, explain a key word: manual coloring.

After the invention of photography, people found a way to "copy" people, natural scenery and social and cultural features. However, due to the limitation of technology, the "copied" object presents monotonous black and white, losing the gorgeous color of the real world, and even not comparable to the color level of painting.

Therefore, all photo studios, photographers and customers all over the world want to get color images, which will make the photos more realistic and artistic.

As early as the1840s, when photography was just popularized, the manual coloring process of photos began to be widely used by European photographers.

After the 1860 s, the coloring process developed further, and there were photos that were enhanced by carbon process and dichromate process. The operation process of these two methods is extremely complicated, but the color stability is stronger and the picture presented is more beautiful.

According to historical scholars' research, color photos appeared in the late Qing Dynasty in1870s, later than European society. Williams Sauders, an Englishman who runs a photo studio in Shanghai, may be "the first photographer in China to draw by hand". He colored the original photos of protein by hand, which reflected the trend of color photography at that time.

Since then, western photographers who set up photo studios in China, such as William pryor Floyd and C.E. Lennon, as well as local photographers such as Li Fang and Liang Shitai, have used manual coloring technology to add color to portraits, which has been widely welcomed by customers.

In fact, after the birth of color film, manual coloring is still popular for decades. Because color photos printed with color film are easy to fade, color photos printed with manual coloring process can be preserved for a long time.

Nowadays, due to the popularity of computer restoration technology and related AI coloring software, some people use these new technologies to color old photos in black and white during the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and claim to "truly restore historical scenes" or "restore real historical figures".

In this regard, my attitude is: I am in favor of repairing damaged old photos, but I am opposed to coloring. We lack the perception of historical scenes. Saunders and others saw what color clothes, jewelry and handkerchiefs the subjects wore, so the color choice was closer to reality. But we use AI to color, because of personal subjective imagination or software automatic matching, far from restoring history.