For this picture with old little bottles, dried flowers and ancient porcelain, I choose to adjust my picture with a slight cross processing. This helps giving to the picture an “authentic” aspect. However, please note that if this kind of adjustment for old things is more pleasant for our mind, in fact, it's only a strong psychologic need from us to anchor a scene to a defined temporal epoch. Do you think the “reality” for our grandparents and before was dull and non colorful? Of course not! ;) Bottles and labels here were certainly more colored, and even if olds cameras were capturing pictures with many defaults (as today), they were “retouching” indeed!, and the real world was not dirt, sepia and even less black and white! So has I said, it's a psychologic need. Today, when producers want to create a movie where action takes place during 50's, a bunch of processing is done because we obviously would not understand such a movie with razor sharp, colorful,… in fact “real” images. Our brain's learning, for each epoch, each jump in the technology, we define precisely how was a picture captured at this time, with defaults, limits, directly linked to the technology. And “we” (our mind), need that! I was partly pointing this out in my previous thinking about the need of adjustments in photography.
