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This is a cool party trick, but I don't see a need for this in any real applications. Black and white is its own art form, and a lot of really great black and w
by jurassic 3y ago
This is a cool party trick, but I don't see a need for this in any real applications. Black and white is its own art form, and a lot of really great black and white images would look like absolute garbage if you could convert them to color. This is because the things that make a great black and white image (dramatic contrasts, emphasis on shape/geometry, texture, etc) can lose a lot of their impact when you introduce color. Our aesthetic tolerance for contrast seems significantly reduced in color because our expectations for the image are more anchored in how things look in the real world. And colors which can be very pleasing in some images are just distracting in others.
So all this is to say.... I don't think there would be commercial demand to, say, "upgrade" classic movies with color. Those films were shot by cinematographers who were steeped in the black & white medium and made lighting and compositional choices that take greatest advantage of those creative limitations.
- pythonguython 3y agoCounterexample: They Shall Not Grow Old, a WW1 documentary film with mostly colorized footage with recreated audio. The film was commercially successful and I found it to be a great watch.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I don't think there would be commercial demand to, say, "upgrade" classic movies with color. There was, and maybe there will be again once we get far enough from the consumer burnout from the absolute deluge of that in, mostly, the 1980s-1990s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black-and-white_films_that_have_been_colorized https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black-and-white_film...
- MrVandemar 3y agoSome of the old Doctor Who stories that were filmed in colour they only have black and white copies of. The colourisations have been ... very good, better than I would have thought, but not perfect. Could be an a good application.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- simonw 3y agoI've run colorization like this against historic photographs and it had a very real impact on me - I found myself able to imagine life when the photo or video was taken much more easily when it was no longer in black and white. Here's an example I really enjoyed, of a snowball fight in 1896: https://twitter.com/JoaquimCampa/status/1311391615425093634 https://twitter.com/JoaquimCampa/status/1311391615425093634
- dylan604 3y agoThe issue I have is that the examples appear to be color images that were converted to black and white. In other words, they are modern images with plenty of images acquired in color for training. Converting an archival shot from early 20th century is totally different. Totally lowers credibility in my eyes
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago> I don't think there would be commercial demand to, say, "upgrade" classic movies with color. Alas there has been serious money in this in the past (VHS and as I understand it US cable TV). I would not assume that we have more taste now than we did then. (The state of cinema suggests the opposite to me at least.)
- yieldcrv 3y ago> but I don't see a need for this in any real applications when your mom asks you to make a black and white image in color digital retouchers do this kind of work all day for decades
- 112233 3y agoI really really want something like this to actually reduce noise in images. Current raw photo denoising often is little more than a tuned up gaussian blur. Making it guess color based on larger context and external info would be step up. Eztra happy if it would be possibe to tune denoising, using photos from the same series. Multiframe NLMeans right now is slow and mostly theoretical.
- ragnarok451 3y agoHave you used Topaz Labs? That denoising is pretty good, definitely more advanced than a tuned-up gaussian.