(lively music) - It's really easy to view the past as foreign when it's in black and white.

I think color really brings things to life.

- [Carter] St.

Louis historian, Mark Loehrer, has a knack for seeing history through a colorful lens.

- Colorization to me is more than just taking the black and white picture and putting into Photoshop and coloring it.

It's really developing a relationship with the picture like a writer develops a relationship with their characters.

Even though the pictures are still, people in the pictures were alive at one point.

They had their own lives, they're going to work, they're going to school.

- [Carter] Colorization has been a practice since the 1860s when artists would take watercolor to fill in black and white photos by hand.

Photos developed on the metal plates known as daguerreotypes were some of the most common to have color added.

Though technology has advanced since the 19th century, modern day colorization is surprisingly similar.

Using programs like Photoshop, colors meticulously section off individual aspects of a piece and add color as they see fit.

- I put so much effort into finding these pictures.

St.

Louis institutions have done an incredible amount of work to digitize their collections.

That's primarily why I work with St.

Louis stuff, 'cause we have a lot of it.

I like the obscure ones.

I like the landmarks.

But like, that's a big part of the process, is the hunt, whether the picture can be colored and whether the picture should be colored.

- [Carter] But the process of coloring a photo isn't a quick one.

- I'm kind of a perfectionist.

So, colors, I can do a color in three hours, but then I'll just dwell over it and make sure everything's perfect.

It's real pain, but, I mean, there's no gain without the pain.

- [Carter] While Mark does sell his prints through his company Arch City Designs, he's made it clear that he's not in it for the money.

- I don't go into coloring a picture and choosing a picture because I can sell it or I want to sell it.

You just gotta color what you wanna color.

You gotta do what you wanna do.

Because if you're gonna sit there and spend five hours coloring a picture, it better be something that you're invested in.

- [Carter] The art of colorization isn't an exact science.

Throughout his journey, Mark has learned to take certain liberties when working on his pieces.

- [Carter] I'm gonna say straight off that I don't go for purity in my pictures.

I think if you want a mirror image of what St.

Louis was like in 1955, you just look for a colored picture then.

Find a colored picture.

Don't ask me.

I personally prefer a more artistic style sort of an imagined look at St.

Louis in color, as I imagine it might look using realistic, you know, red brick and signs that are kind of researched to make sure that they're the right appropriate signs for those colors and stuff like that.

But not really realistic 'cause I want it to be artistic, you know?

Something like my own take on what this would look like in color.

- [Carter] For Mark, colorization is as much art as it is history.

- It gets people to look at pictures that they would otherwise ignore.

And there's so many pictures that we have of St.

Louis.

I tend to gravitate towards the pictures that show scenes that aren't recognizable.

Scenes that might not be readily important.

They don't jump at you as like, "Well, this is the arch under construction," or "This is the old courthouse."

This might just be a street widening project on this small block.

But now you get to see this small block in color, and suddenly you care about it.

- [Carter] Piece by piece, building by building, Mark adds a bit more vibrancy to St.

Louis' past.