I had a pretty good time as a teenager. Not great...but pretty good. I just wish that we had better photo tech back in the 1970s. You know what I had? A Kodak pocket camera with film cartridges and a flash extender to reduce the red-eye. Let me tell you...the extender didn't work. Every flash photo made our eyes glow red like a cat. We all looked possessed. As if that wasn't bad enough...colors in the photos faded from UV rays. That's why your box of prints are turning red...like our eyes in 1974. But that's all fixable today.
Colorization and Restoration
The kid with the snaggle teeth is yours truly. Yeah, we had color film in 1965 but the film degraded. This was brought back with some restoration and some layer masking. The first communion girl was a 1953 image that started as a black & white image.
The 1967 Chicago blizzard. Good times when you were a squirt. Added some color for a friend. I can hear the snow squeak just looking at it.
Introducing color creates a new image where you can start to see things you never saw before.
A classic 1959 image of my mom and my brother. I was able to color-correct the hot mess and tilted image. Check out her green dress. 1950s cool.
Kodak film degrades in order of color. First, yellow goes. Then cyan. Then magenta. Black tends to last a lot longer. The science behind it isn't the point. The point is...its fixable in most cases.