BB62vet wrote:
Just a couple other comments re. the painting of artifacts/museum ships:
1) Having been to some of the east coast museum ships and various museums displaying artifacts, I can honestly say that the items open to the public and on display are NOT to be taken as factual in how they were painted during their actual operational service. Many of the ship museums do not adhere to the USN guidelines for that class of ship at the time in which it is being depicted. They are often sloppy about how and what is (or is not) painted, etc.
2) Unfortunately, black & white photos are hard to discern when trying to figure out colors from these photos. I think Rick E. Davis would agree and he's spent countless hours doing serious research with b/w photos from WW1 & WW2, etc.
Yeah, when we were learning Colorization (this was before Photoshop, but they also teach it in advanced Photoshop classes) of B&W Photos, a few of the crucial things we were taught was:
1) What kind of a film is being used (Panchromatic or Orthochromatic)?
This made a HUGE difference in how Reds, Greens, Yellows, and Blues showed up on film.2) What in the image is
White and what in the image is
Black?
This is important to setting the "Neutral Value" shades/tints of all colors in the space.3) How blown-out is the brightest object in the photo (On old B&W Cameras, they had no aperture settings to avoid blowing blowing out your whites in a really sunny shot)?
This would tell you that some things that looked white might not BE White. And to be careful about anything that "looked" Black/Dark.At real Museums (Art Museums, and official Military Museums), they will employ Art Preservation Experts that know these things (A dept I worked in when I was very young back in the late-70s/early-80s at the Dallas Museum of Art, learning the trade).
Now, you have bigger museums like the NY Met employing huge teams of people to correct Prints in PS to adjust them to clear up things like Blown-out skies, or lack of details in a shadow (there is usually information in the negative for what is in the shadow, but you have to expose just that portion of the negative for something like half an hour to get the details to start coming out).
BB62vet wrote:
I've learned to never truly trust museum (ship) items for colors, but only shape/size/construction details. U.S. Navy paint stds. are not all that hard to understand if you have a time period to work within and know that ship's (various) paint scheme(s) during that time period.
Then too, modelers tend to be a bit more discerning when it comes to "getting things right" than the average
landlubber!
Hank
But, yeah, when it comes to Museum Ships, they rarely have endowments big enough to hire such specialists to check for if they have got the colors on the Ships accurate to the actual paint or pigments that would be used.
MB