11 ms·

I wrote a quick script the other day to colorize directories of family photos. I realized it would be cool to colorize these photos, too. Here's the album: http

by skzv 5y ago

I wrote a quick script the other day to colorize directories of family photos. I realized it would be cool to colorize these photos, too. Here's the album: https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi. Here's the repo for the colorizing model itself: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/ImageColorizerColabStable.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters. If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos

ghostly_s 5y ago
Please don't do this.
- Firerouge 5y ago
  Why not? I've also colorized pictures and video frames using these same sorts of processes. It's reasonably quick and works pretty well
  - xwdv 5y ago
    It’s fake, and pretty soon people will not even want to entertain the idea of looking at photos or videos that are not in color.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lethologica 5y ago
      That’s discounting the scores of people who prefer to watch cinema in black and white. Many movies are now coming out with black and white variants (Snyder cut of Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) black and white isn’t going anywhere. Saying this is like saying people won’t want to read books any more because digital text exists.
    - agogdog 5y ago
      Photos are also fake, did you know the past wasn't really black and white?
    - totetsu 5y ago
      I didn't want to look at all the adds on the original page
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      It’s not entirely fake. These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up due to subtlety or unfamiliarity with the time, place or people depicted. So while the colorized photos are not entirely faithful, they do tell us more about the scene the photo captured.
      - bnegreve 5y ago
        > These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up It is a machine learning model, so not really. Instead, the model makes an educated guess of the most likely color, based on vast amounts of pictures sampled un-uniformly from very different areas of the world.
        1123581321 5y ago
        Forgive me for the imprecise language—the bases for the educated guesses are the information I was referring to. Humans are not as good at seeing that a certain shade of gray is more likely to be light yellow than light blue, for example. You’re completely right that datasets trained on regions and historical information would produce more accurate results on black-and-white photos identified to the model as being from similar places and times.
    - matt-attack 5y ago
      I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. It’s not like people wanted their pictures looking like that. It’s even a common trope in modern films to use black and white when showing flashbacks to time periods around the beginning of the 20th century. But that’s not how the world looked! It’s a cheep and deceptive tool imho.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
        Well a colorized photo will only be more deceptive since it's just a guess. B&W aren't deceptive, they just are.
        randallsquared 5y ago
        B&W photos don't have a lack of color; they've just restricted the color to certain values. A colorized photo might or might not get the colors correct, but the B&W photo definitely doesn't.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        >I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. This makes my eyes roll like I'm a professional golfer. I love B&W, and even without using B&W film, I will still turn certain color images I take into B&W. There are lots of artistic reasons, but most of the time it just feels right. Sometimes, it's just an aesthetic reason of matching the decor of where the print is going to hang. >I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. So what? There are also people that believe the world is flat. There are plenty of museums full of paintings from well before photography was invented that clearly show color. Anyone that believes that the world was in B&W before color film just need to be walked away from as there's nothing but frustration there.
      - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
        > I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive...Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. That limit materially constrained the information that could be captured, but it didn't invent false information. It was a dimensionality reduction from color to simple brightness intensity. Sure, the information captured was through that lens/filter, but there wasn't some AI inventing/guessing at what it was seeing. The photons directly exposed the chemicals in the film. They are not equivalent at all, and your reduction based upon the fact that humans add an additional interpretive perspective to each is a stretch. I say all of this while being fine with colorized photos, but they should be accompanied by the original photo and the disclaimer that they were colorized. I think colorized photos can add a lot of immersion and trigger emotion, but so does generative, interpretive art. We shouldn't treat Monet's water lilies as an accurate portrayal of his flower garden at his home in Giverny. Colorized photos, while not as extreme as impressionist paintings, are still a generated piece of art. Perhaps they are more akin to portraits, which have been historically shown bias towards an unflattering view of the subject -- as when they are unflattering, they tend to not to survive[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%27s_Portrait_of_Winston_Churchill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%27s_Portrait_of_Win...
- Moodles 5y ago
  Why? Have you tried just not clicking on the album?
- skzv 5y ago
  I can understand the concern. It can mislead people about what the past really looked like. An example: this same model colorized the Golden Gate white: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3487a03626fd86d4f8c8146361c2913bea3a2e0166ca38a9743cb8ea06baf045/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f365362466a66712e6a7067 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3487a03626fd86d4f8c814636... In my case I wasn't too concerned, since I was sharing the photos with my family, who understood they were artificially colorized. My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong. Nonetheless, to me and my family, it made our old photographs seem so close and alive, which made it worth it. A good compromise may be to mark these retouched photos with a small watermark indicating that they have been altered. By the way, I think the colab instances running this model have the option to add watermarks for this reason (https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/ImageColorizerColabStable.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...).
  - user982 5y ago
    There was this incident from last month: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/11/cambodia-condemns-vice-for-altered-khmer-rouge-images https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/11/cambodia-condemns-v... Cambodia has called on US media group Vice to withdraw an article that featured newly-colourised photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge, saying the images are an insult to the dead because some had been altered to add smiles. “We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims,” [Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture] said.
    - skhr0680 5y ago
      I don't think it was just the colorizing that was the problem. He was changing their expressions into smiles!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - foota 5y ago
    I wonder at what point the photo would be colorized correctly. The golden gate bridge is almost certainly in the training data if it's random photos. Maybe it knows to color completed things?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Never tell someone to not do things like this. If it increases the audience all the better. It's the way people learn things. When you declare things as taboo it only hurts liberty.
  - blackoil 5y ago
    There is a valid concern that people may learn/infer wrong things. Liberty isn't end all catch phrase.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      People may just as easily infer the wrong things from black and white still photography. There's no defense against people's ability to misinterpret things.
  - open0 5y ago
    So, be like the guy that applied some shitty style-transfer algorithm to the Tuol Sleng concentration camp photos, which made some of the victims start smiling?
- acomjean 5y ago
  It neat, and works amazingly well. I don't love it though, but I like the look of black and white photos (I was shooting black and white in the 90s when I worked at a college paper). Not having the color in there focuses your attention differently and in my case I would use the camera slightly differently. But they've alway wanted colors in photographs. Going as far as actually hand coloring them. This is kinda like that but automated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs I wish there was a little symbol you could put in the corner to indicate "colorized" or "altered" for composite photos done with photoshop.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
afterburner 5y ago
This is really great. Even if the colours might be off from actual reality, it brings it to life nonetheless.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  On the flip side it doesn't bring it to life for me because of the mistakes. Several times you can see a hand is grey while the face is colorized to a peach type color. Wicker baskets are colored grey. All clothes are blue for some reason. That kind of stuff just tells me it's making assumptions which are likely to be incorrect and I discount the colorization altogether.
HellDunkel 5y ago
You have successfully removed the visual excellence of those images.
gorgoiler 5y ago
This is fascinating, thank you. It’s hard to explain my color blindness to people and I’m inclined to begin with this HN thread in future. I can differentiate color mostly fine and have never mis interpreted grass as green, but clothing and fabric always pose problems, just as with your AI. I’ve learned to be ok with things not looking real. Black and white is just as unreal to me as false color toning, but feels more honest and deliberate. The luma of the Armalite wielding guerrilla is amazing — it’s hard to beat black and white as a descriptor format.
andrew_ 5y ago
This was really cool. Thank you for taking the time to put that together.

by skzv 5y ago

ghostly_s 5y ago

Please don't do this.

Firerouge 5y ago
Why not? I've also colorized pictures and video frames using these same sorts of processes. It's reasonably quick and works pretty well
- xwdv 5y ago
  It’s fake, and pretty soon people will not even want to entertain the idea of looking at photos or videos that are not in color.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lethologica 5y ago
    That’s discounting the scores of people who prefer to watch cinema in black and white. Many movies are now coming out with black and white variants (Snyder cut of Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) black and white isn’t going anywhere. Saying this is like saying people won’t want to read books any more because digital text exists.
  - agogdog 5y ago
    Photos are also fake, did you know the past wasn't really black and white?
  - totetsu 5y ago
    I didn't want to look at all the adds on the original page
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    It’s not entirely fake. These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up due to subtlety or unfamiliarity with the time, place or people depicted. So while the colorized photos are not entirely faithful, they do tell us more about the scene the photo captured.
    - bnegreve 5y ago
      > These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up It is a machine learning model, so not really. Instead, the model makes an educated guess of the most likely color, based on vast amounts of pictures sampled un-uniformly from very different areas of the world.
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        Forgive me for the imprecise language—the bases for the educated guesses are the information I was referring to. Humans are not as good at seeing that a certain shade of gray is more likely to be light yellow than light blue, for example. You’re completely right that datasets trained on regions and historical information would produce more accurate results on black-and-white photos identified to the model as being from similar places and times.
  - matt-attack 5y ago
    I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. It’s not like people wanted their pictures looking like that. It’s even a common trope in modern films to use black and white when showing flashbacks to time periods around the beginning of the 20th century. But that’s not how the world looked! It’s a cheep and deceptive tool imho.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Well a colorized photo will only be more deceptive since it's just a guess. B&W aren't deceptive, they just are.
      - randallsquared 5y ago
        B&W photos don't have a lack of color; they've just restricted the color to certain values. A colorized photo might or might not get the colors correct, but the B&W photo definitely doesn't.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. This makes my eyes roll like I'm a professional golfer. I love B&W, and even without using B&W film, I will still turn certain color images I take into B&W. There are lots of artistic reasons, but most of the time it just feels right. Sometimes, it's just an aesthetic reason of matching the decor of where the print is going to hang. >I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. So what? There are also people that believe the world is flat. There are plenty of museums full of paintings from well before photography was invented that clearly show color. Anyone that believes that the world was in B&W before color film just need to be walked away from as there's nothing but frustration there.
    - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
      > I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive...Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. That limit materially constrained the information that could be captured, but it didn't invent false information. It was a dimensionality reduction from color to simple brightness intensity. Sure, the information captured was through that lens/filter, but there wasn't some AI inventing/guessing at what it was seeing. The photons directly exposed the chemicals in the film. They are not equivalent at all, and your reduction based upon the fact that humans add an additional interpretive perspective to each is a stretch. I say all of this while being fine with colorized photos, but they should be accompanied by the original photo and the disclaimer that they were colorized. I think colorized photos can add a lot of immersion and trigger emotion, but so does generative, interpretive art. We shouldn't treat Monet's water lilies as an accurate portrayal of his flower garden at his home in Giverny. Colorized photos, while not as extreme as impressionist paintings, are still a generated piece of art. Perhaps they are more akin to portraits, which have been historically shown bias towards an unflattering view of the subject -- as when they are unflattering, they tend to not to survive[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%27s_Portrait_of_Winston_Churchill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%27s_Portrait_of_Win...
Moodles 5y ago
Why? Have you tried just not clicking on the album?
skzv 5y ago
I can understand the concern. It can mislead people about what the past really looked like. An example: this same model colorized the Golden Gate white: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3487a03626fd86d4f8c8146361c2913bea3a2e0166ca38a9743cb8ea06baf045/68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f365362466a66712e6a7067 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3487a03626fd86d4f8c814636... In my case I wasn't too concerned, since I was sharing the photos with my family, who understood they were artificially colorized. My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong. Nonetheless, to me and my family, it made our old photographs seem so close and alive, which made it worth it. A good compromise may be to mark these retouched photos with a small watermark indicating that they have been altered. By the way, I think the colab instances running this model have the option to add watermarks for this reason (https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/ImageColorizerColabStable.ipynb https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...).
- user982 5y ago
  There was this incident from last month: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/11/cambodia-condemns-vice-for-altered-khmer-rouge-images https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/11/cambodia-condemns-v... Cambodia has called on US media group Vice to withdraw an article that featured newly-colourised photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge, saying the images are an insult to the dead because some had been altered to add smiles. “We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims,” [Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture] said.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    I don't think it was just the colorizing that was the problem. He was changing their expressions into smiles!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- foota 5y ago
  I wonder at what point the photo would be colorized correctly. The golden gate bridge is almost certainly in the training data if it's random photos. Maybe it knows to color completed things?
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Never tell someone to not do things like this. If it increases the audience all the better. It's the way people learn things. When you declare things as taboo it only hurts liberty.
- blackoil 5y ago
  There is a valid concern that people may learn/infer wrong things. Liberty isn't end all catch phrase.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    People may just as easily infer the wrong things from black and white still photography. There's no defense against people's ability to misinterpret things.
- open0 5y ago
  So, be like the guy that applied some shitty style-transfer algorithm to the Tuol Sleng concentration camp photos, which made some of the victims start smiling?
acomjean 5y ago
It neat, and works amazingly well. I don't love it though, but I like the look of black and white photos (I was shooting black and white in the 90s when I worked at a college paper). Not having the color in there focuses your attention differently and in my case I would use the camera slightly differently. But they've alway wanted colors in photographs. Going as far as actually hand coloring them. This is kinda like that but automated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs I wish there was a little symbol you could put in the corner to indicate "colorized" or "altered" for composite photos done with photoshop.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

afterburner 5y ago

This is really great. Even if the colours might be off from actual reality, it brings it to life nonetheless.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
On the flip side it doesn't bring it to life for me because of the mistakes. Several times you can see a hand is grey while the face is colorized to a peach type color. Wicker baskets are colored grey. All clothes are blue for some reason. That kind of stuff just tells me it's making assumptions which are likely to be incorrect and I discount the colorization altogether.

HellDunkel 5y ago

You have successfully removed the visual excellence of those images.

gorgoiler 5y ago

This is fascinating, thank you. It’s hard to explain my color blindness to people and I’m inclined to begin with this HN thread in future. I can differentiate color mostly fine and have never mis interpreted grass as green, but clothing and fabric always pose problems, just as with your AI. I’ve learned to be ok with things not looking real. Black and white is just as unreal to me as false color toning, but feels more honest and deliberate. The luma of the Armalite wielding guerrilla is amazing — it’s hard to beat black and white as a descriptor format.

andrew_ 5y ago

This was really cool. Thank you for taking the time to put that together.