Painting colour to black-and-white photos

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Written by

Scientist and artist exploring the beauty and magic of nature

1 year ago

Topics: AI, Photography

This might be slightly controversial, but I decided to share how I processed black-and-white film photos with the app Colorize (I’m not an affiliate). It uses AI to restore colour in old photos, so I decided to give it a try. It is not perfect and sometimes downright fails, but it manages surprisingly well on most occasions. I believe that they have optimised it for portraits and maybe landscapes. I rarely shoot people, so I have not tested.

I shall start with a photo of a train in a museum. There are some greens and reds in the locomotive that aren’t supposed to be there, but I like how nicely it painted the floor. I have no recollection of what colour it was in real life. I took the photos several years ago.

Next, I have a winter landscape. The app managed to recognise that snow should remain white. The sky is a uniform white, but there are no clouds or any other features in the original, either. The colour of the river is okay, though getting a bit too red in the sunlit area. The trees got a nice green colour - well done, Colorize.

Recognising bricks was so-so. Those on the church below are mostly red, but there are some broad green areas. In some other photos of brick buildings that I tried, the bricks remained gray or pale red. I guess it’s not so easy to distinguish them from ordinary paint on the facade of a house.

All in all, it’s a fun app, and the free version seems to be fully functional when it comes to actual photo processing. Exporting in high resolution requires a subscription.

Still, monochrome is my passion, and I doubt I will be colouring many photos.