Website Magically Turns B&W Photos Into Color Ones Using AI

Want a taste of the future? There’s a new web app that uses advanced “deep learning” research to magically auto-colorize black-and-white photos.

The app uses the Colorful Image Colorization algorithm that’s being developed by a team at UC Berkeley led by PhD student Richard Zhang. We first reported on the technology back in March 2016, and now there’s an online demo that anyone can try on any photograph.

Simply paste a URL to a photo into the website and press the purple “Colorize It” button. After some processing and a short wait, the page displays a side-by-side comparison of the B&W and colorized photos that you can switch between.

Here are a couple of example colorizations provided by the app’s creators:

And here are some of the results we got from testing the app ourselves:

If these colorizations were created by a human retoucher, you’d probably think they were horribly done by someone lacking in talent. But what’s impressive is that the color was completely added by artificial intelligence without any human intervention — the computer simply “learned” what colors to use by learning from over 1 million other photos.

Knowing that, this is an impressive demo indeed, and a small taste of what could be in store for photographers and retouchers with everyday photo-editing software in the future.

Head on over to the web app if you’d like to try it out on your own B&W photo.