Past Pics

This item at Mashable takes some photos of immigrants through Ellis Island in the early 20th century and colorizes them. The originals were taken by talented amateur photog and Ellis Island clerk Augustus Sherman and many are on display at the Ellis Island Museum as well as the New York Public Library.

The colorizing is being done with modern techniques applied to the original sepia tones. Although there is no way to definitively know if these were the actual colors of the garments worn by Sherman's subjects, the resulting images are light-years better than the pastel washes that Ted Turner's outfit layered on classic black-and-white movies in the late 1980s.

Sometimes we can almost forget that the world was in color before there were color photographs, and that we have black-and-white memories because those are the images we can see. The current project, by Dynamichrone's Jordan Lloyd, may help make those old images more lively in our minds and connect us to the real people they depict.