NASA photographs brought to life in color

From project Mercury, to Gemini, Apollo and beyond, NASA made available an incredible trove of photographs in 2015. They number in their thousands and document an era that bore advent to new technologies and deeper understandings. The photographs are reflective of decades of achievement by NASA and their affiliates.

The majority are available only in monochrome and leave the observer wondering. I saw an opportunity to re-imagine a very small part of this image library and I set to work. I have been colorizing photographs for a little over two years using a background technique called neural networks (N.N). It’s a method that is still very much in its infancy, however where it excels, is in its accuracy level for matching grayscale shades to corresponding hues in red, green and blue (R.G.B). This method applied digitally and by hand, using a stylus, is arguably educating observers owing to its accuracy. Colorization is no longer ‘guess work’ and shouldn’t be if the purpose is to both educate and preserve.

The NASA photographs present a huge puzzle in that they are so very intricate. Not only do they document faces and and machines, but they document entire scenes full of people, equipment, varied lighting and textures. It’s why just one photograph in particular took almost a week to complete in November 2015. N.N and the unique way it is being adapted, lets us all take a long glimpse at what has essentially been trapped in grayscale since the beginning. The eye is designed to see in color and new technology is bringing the art of colorization ever more forwards.

The photographs are documented and transitioned to their color equivalents in this short video. It will leave you wondering and forms part a far larger project in the making, dealing specifically with bygone NASA imagery. From Apollo 13 and Flight Director Eugene Kranz to the highly decorated astronaut John Glenn, colorization has brought some answers to visual questions.