AI colorize of a Minox frame

Minox · May 5, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
But in terms of an "artsy" novelty, we'll get sick of it soon enough, just like all exploding fads. But that discussion, with its inevitable stack of barf bags, properly belongs to the digital or hybrid section, and not here.

True; perhaps the thread can be moved to that section.

bjorke · May 5, 2023

From 1902 -- clearly just a fad.

bjorke · May 5, 2023

BTW, do you have to cut your own film for the Minox?

Don_ih · May 5, 2023

DREW WILEY said:
But in terms of an "artsy" novelty, we'll get sick of it soon enough, just like all exploding fads.

Well, there doesn't seem to be much of a "get AI to colourize your photos" fad. Almost no one cares. And the ones that do are likely trying to add colour to their own, personal old photos - inherited ones - and probably don't care so much for accuracy, particularly in the foliage. So long as there's some colour to liven up those old, boring black-and-white photos of the ancestors.

@bjorke -- there was also an entire trade of people who added colour to photos by hand. Everyone liked to have rosy cheeks.

Minox · May 5, 2023

bjorke said:
BTW, do you have to cut your own film for the Minox?

If the question was intended for me, yes, I do cut my own Minox film.

bjorke · May 5, 2023

Don Heisz said:
@bjorke -- there was also an entire trade of people who added colour to photos by hand. Everyone liked to have rosy cheeks.

I have several such Victorian/Edwardian era photos, I know! I'm not entirely certain, bt my impression is that rosy cheeks indicated the photo was of someone alive at the time of photographing (since many were not -- have some of those, too, and they are grey)

The frame from Méliès's Trip to the Moon is from a print -- just one print of several! -- that was hand-painted on every frame.

Thanks @Minox!

BAC1967 · May 5, 2023

Shouldn’t AI learn and improve, otherwise it’s just a regular program. I would assume the color choices and tones would improve if it’s getting any user input. I have no idea how this stuff works, these are just my assumptions from what I’ve read about AI.

BAC1967 · May 5, 2023

I used the img2go web site to colorize this one from an infrared photo, just for fun. The last photo is a digital shot to show the actual colors. Obviously it missed some of the bright yellow, but then how would it know that. I really wanted to see how the IR shot messed with it. It did ok with the thatch roof. The Areca Catechu trees are much lighter, that must be from the IR making them bright white. It made the chain and posts look rusty, when they were actually yellow, but the yellow on the building was made white. I assume it recognizes objects and chooses the colors that way, like vegetation is green, steel objects are rusty...

jeffreyg · May 5, 2023

While far from perfect colorizing and other such apps can salvage and add fun to old family photos. An example of an over 100 year old family portrait made at a photo studio of family members who have all passed. (un-manipulated
PhotoShop neural filter) My grandchildren can see their great-great grandparents in color. My mother was the youngest in the middle.

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HOME | SCULPTURE and PHOTOGRAPHY

DREW WILEY · May 5, 2023

In the days before routine digital restoration, I sometimes made some pretty good side money copying images on negatives or old damaged prints, using the copy stand and films specially suited to such applications, like Tech Pan. Nobody wanted them colorized, but resembling the original process itself, for instance a brown-toned print to resemble a damaged old albumen one, yet enlarged. But even in our own family collection we have a slightly painted Daguerrotype with rosy cheeks, and painted in eyes due to the very long exposure. Early commercial photographers didn't have the time to color everything with oil paint; that seems to have been more a hobbyist or Pictorialist thing later on. Edward Curtis had it done to a few of his Indian portraits; the strictly black and white versions are far more compelling. But people were fiddling around, since actual color photography was either still in its infancy, or too complicated to be practical.

reddesert · May 5, 2023

Don Heisz said:
Well, there doesn't seem to be much of a "get AI to colourize your photos" fad. Almost no one cares. And the ones that do are likely trying to add colour to their own, personal old photos - inherited ones - and probably don't care so much for accuracy, particularly in the foliage. So long as there's some colour to liven up those old, boring black-and-white photos of the ancestors.

It might be more popular for old movie footage than old stills. I see some things on Youtube and social media that are like "Historical footage of New York in 1910, color added," etc. These are generally colorised by an automated process rather than by hand (obviously, colorising movie footage frame by frame manually would be a lot of work).

Although this is not literally historically correct, there is also an interesting argument for it. Peter Jackson's recent movie "They Shall Not Grow Old," a 2018 documentary on World War I at the centenary of its end, used colorised historical footage entirely, combined with audio mostly from actual recordings of interviews of WWI veterans. I'm sure Jackson exerted more artistic control than simply chucking the footage into an AI, but the film does have the aspect of realistic though desaturated color.

Jackson's argument, roughly, was that black and white footage imposed a historical distance and that colorising it would render the experience immediate to the modern viewer, that this was something that happened to people just like us, not ancient artifacts. Jackson said, "[The men] saw a war in colour, they certainly didn't see it in black and white. I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more – rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film." I saw the film in the theater and it was deeply moving, I strongly recommend it.

wiltw · May 5, 2023

Curious about the topic of AI colorization, I took a photo shot by myself in Versailles in 2019, stored RAW and initially RAW converted with Lightroom

As shot

Desaturated the above shot

Used AI program DeepAI free online trial to colorize the desaturate photo (above)

Then used PaintShop Pro to increase saturation of the automatically colorized photo

Others are invited to upload my desaturated photo and try colorizing it with other AI software and post the outcome to this thread, so it can be compared to the original full color shot.
Here is the link https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/i63/wiltonw/Desaturated.jpg

BAC1967 · May 5, 2023

img2go put more gold into the fence.

wiltw · May 5, 2023

BAC1967 said:
img2go put more gold into the fence.

View attachment 337826

Thanks for that test. It still didn't guess about the lady in the bright red coat near the frame edge!
The sky seen between the verticals of the fence seems pretty miserable, too, not any better than my test app.

4season · May 5, 2023

I'm sort of relieved to see these results, because it suggests that "A.I." isn't omnipotent, at least not yet! The day it can correctly identify precisely what and who it is seeing, right down to the clothing being worn, is the day I'll freak out, along with the creators of reCAPTCHA.

Bronson Dugnutt · May 5, 2023

Here's a whack at it from DeepAI.org

Regula Picca-mat, 'A' mode ISO 100
Kentmere 100, Pyrocat-MC 1+1+100 11'

(original negative scan) -> (Ai image) -> (manual white balance)

If you could give the AI hints (e.g. "This is a cichlid and/or cyprinoid") we all may be doomed

Edit: Upon some short reflection, the final image reminds me a lot of trichrome images composited from orthochromatic film. Reds and oranges are squelched while yellows, blues, and greens make up most of the palette.

bjorke · May 5, 2023

Bronson Dugnutt said:
Here's a whack at it from DeepAI.org

Regula Picca-mat, 'A' mode ISO 100
Kentmere 100, Pyrocat-MC 1+1+100 11'

(original negative scan) -> (Ai image) -> (manual white balance)
View attachment 337836
View attachment 337837
View attachment 337838

If you could give the AI hints (e.g. "This is a cichlid and/or cyprinoid") we all may be doomed

Edit: Upon some short reflection, the final image reminds me a lot of trichrome images composited from orthochromatic film. Reds and oranges are squelched while yellows, blues, and greens make up most of the palette.

the middle one is the correct color, it's just that the fishtank is filthy.

with colorization, colorized" and "in color" have always been different, I wouldn't worry about such things. Just add it to your toolbox

bjorke_TPE_MONO6676-double.jpg

bjorke
May 5, 2023

Quick colorization example based on a shot made with Leica Monochrom.

dutchsteammachine · May 6, 2023

I really like the ones https://palette.fm/ produces. And you can steer it in a certain direction with prompts as well that it tries to take into consideration.

These are all B/W photos from the 1900s to 1940s. I am really impressed with how it handles skin tones and separation of skin of objects of clothing. AI colourization really struggles with that. Also really loves how it renders water.

warden · May 6, 2023

dutchsteammachine said:
I really like the ones https://palette.fm/ produces. And you can steer it in a certain direction with prompts as well that it tries to take into consideration.

These are all B/W photos from the 1900s to 1940s. I am really impressed with how it handles skin tones and separation of skin of objects of clothing. AI colourization really struggles with that. Also really loves how it renders water.

Those are quite good! I would not have guessed they were bw conversions.

BAC1967 · May 6, 2023

dutchsteammachine said:
I really like the ones https://palette.fm/ produces. And you can steer it in a certain direction with prompts as well that it tries to take into consideration.

These are all B/W photos from the 1900s to 1940s. I am really impressed with how it handles skin tones and separation of skin of objects of clothing. AI colourization really struggles with that. Also really loves how it renders water.

Those look really nice! I like the idea of steering it in certain directions.

warden · May 6, 2023

BAC1967 said:
Those look really nice! I like the idea of steering it in certain directions.

Me too. The Photoshop version does its best to colorize first, and then offers the normal sliders for hue, saturation etc from within the filter, but it applies those sliders to the entire image rather than thinking about the content. I just tried the palette.fm software on one of the bw images from this thread and the results are better than what I could produce in Photoshop, and more fun too.

wiltw · May 6, 2023

Bronson Dugnutt said:
Edit: Upon some short reflection, the final image reminds me a lot of trichrome images composited from orthochromatic film. Reds and oranges are squelched while yellows, blues, and greens make up most of the palette.

OTOH, those familiar with scuba will tell you reds, oranges disappear first underwater...maybe AI is reflecting that reality!

Mustafa Umut Sarac · Nov 20, 2023

Mustafa Umut Sarac · Nov 20, 2023

here is the color version

AI colorize of a Minox frame

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