Sydneytecture: Broadway 1891

Broadway 1891

Original

Today (Google)

George Street West at Jones Street. I dated the year by Sands Directory entries. A steam tram with a shunt (it has no visible number to identify its route) passing some workmen on the woodblocked road that's a little the worse for wear in parts. All the buildings on the far side of the street will be demolished in 1933 for road widening, and it will be renamed Broadway.

If you'd like to see the huge original photo for its incredibly fine details, it's here.

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Sydneytecture is about more than just vintage photos of Sydney restored in colour. The focus is on once-well known places that have been forgotten, and identifying the interesting details in lost, anonymous images.

I also geolocate old mystery photos.

As an old Sydney architecture buff, I wanted to see how life really looked to our ancestors in these faded black & white photos. But just colouring the old-tech wasn't enough, so I strive to make each photo as realistic as if it was taken by a modern camera. And as I enjoy making these, I thought I'd share them here for anyone who's also interested.

[*It's important to know that there are websites on YouTube and Facebook which claim to show vintage photos of Sydney "come to life". However, they are auto-generated AI, and are just totally fictitious cartoons, full of errors and false-invention, nothing at all 'real'.]

My restorations can take days to craft, to ensure they're accurate to their original for archival purposes.

Google Street View is usually linked, so you can check out how each scene is today. All photos are from Trove, and all dates are confirmed via Sand's Directory and Dove's Maps. I regularly upload new posts.

How I work

As an amateur, I work the manually-intensive way. First, the monochrome source image is enhanced in Photoshop to identify the various elements that require work, along with other areas for concentration. Next, I run any necessary elements through Flux2 for primary colouring. The next stage is layer work and assembling in Affinity. The final stage is PS again, where all the fine work on light levels, contrasts, colouring, toning, and refinements are done. Most importantly, everything is constantly cross-matched with the original source image to ensure accurate replication.

...And yet, as AI engines improve, within a year or two all of this will be redundant, as their image-generation capabilities will no doubt be on par.