Here's a black and white photo of Mom (right) with her older sister, my Aunt Jean. It was taken sometime in the 1950s at the farm near Virden, Manitoba.
Here's the same photo colourized by
Jason Antic's image colourization software. Colourizing black and white imagery is nothing new, of course, but I'm pretty impressed by the results given how easy it is to use the software; just upload your photo and the algorithm spits out its best guess.
I deliberately chose to shoot some of Michael and Naomi's wedding with black and white film. Here are Jeff and Susan at that wedding in glorious black and white.
And here they are in colour.
Say what you will about the wisdom of colourization, but for all its flaws I find the process fascinating, and I imagine the colours will achieve greater fidelity and believability as the technology improves.
Wow, that's pretty good. It's hard to do that stuff by hand. After a while you get the hang of it, but I find it a lot of work and it's easy to make mistakes.
ReplyDeleteThe greens looks a little desaturated and the reds and fleshtones look too vivid, but it's not that far off. There are some patches where the computer is guessing wrong, but also it isn't hard to fix. You could use this as a baseline and work from there.
For reference, Susan's dress is lavender purple (search Pantone 2705 in Photoshop). Our hair seems a little too vivid in the picture, but the other browns are correct.
That necktie used to be a "good luck" necktie I wore. It looks exactly as pictured.