Old Photographs Brought to Life With the Latest Colorization Techniques
Photographs taken over 100 years ago can appear like a foreign country, but the people in those photos did not experience the world in black and white.
Photographs taken over 100 years ago can appear like a foreign country, but the people in those photos did not experience the world in black and white.
100-year-old footage taken in New York just months before the Roaring 20s came to a crashing end has been given a new lease of life via AI colorization.
A new artificial intelligence-powered web-based tool called Palette is able to take any black and white photo and colorize it. The creator is so confident in the results that he is billing it "the DALL-E of color."
Digital colorist Marina Amaral can spend anywhere from three hours to three weeks breathing new life into old black and white photographs.
Ancestry, the largest for-profit genealogy website on the planet, has integrated an automatic colorization feature that it says lets users bring make black and white photos more lifelike.
The day after photography was invented in 1839, somebody pointed out that the photographs were just shades of gray – there was no color. The photography inventors knew this was a problem and probably hoped that no one would notice. Paintings were in vivid color and if photography was ever to compete with painting, there needed to be some color in them.
An anonymous digital artist is creating impressive transformations of old black-and-white photos, reimagining them as enhanced and colorized portraits that look as though they were shot in the modern-day.
A historic film restoration editor has compiled, repaired, and colorized 22-minutes of nearly century-old footage that shows the construction of the Empire State Building.
A while back, a young man contacted me about a photo digitization and restoration project for his grandfather, who served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. They had some photographs from this period in his life—of friends, scenery, and the culture of Vietnam—that they wanted to use for an album.
Video restoration expert NASS colorized and enhanced footage from nearly a century ago to create this 7-minute video that reveals what downtown Los Angeles looked like in the 1930s.
Photographer and Youtuber Mathieu Stern recently purchased two glass plate negatives from 1910 and decided to scan, restore, colorize, and animate the photos with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
A talented photo colorizer has paid a tribute to wartime animals by breathing a new and colorful life into historical photographs that depict them and their sacrifices.
A growing trend among retouchers and editors in the last few years has been to repair vintage photographs that have faded and been damaged over time. In addition to this restoration work, "colorizing" vintage photographs has been experiencing explosive growth. Adobe's "Colorize" Neural Filter now makes the job easier than ever.
A newly digitized and colorized newsreel from 1933 is providing the world with a fascinating new look at the Tasmanian Tiger, an animal that has been extinct since 1936.
The ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) image colorization were recently brought to public attention when several historical images were altered using digital algorithms.
Vice and a photo colorization artist are in hot water this week after it was discovered that he had 'Photoshopped' smiles to the faces of Cambodian genocide victims in his colorized photos.
Adobe recently gave Photoshop the ability to instantly colorize photos using Adobe Sensei AI technology. Here's a new 1.5-minute video tutorial by Adobe showing how you can now breathe color into a black-and-white photo with just a few clicks.
Photo colorizer and restorer Hint of Time has shared an 8-minute video where he shows his process for not only colorizing an 80-year-old black and white photo, but also brings it to life with subtle animation.
When you see the term "colorized photo" you probably imagine skilled retouchers working in Photoshop, or perhaps a machine learning algorithm that does that same work automatically. But the original colorized photos were hand-painted prints made from glass plate negatives. And, as Vox explains, the best of these images came out of Japan.
Colorizing and updating photos and footage from the past is becoming more common and much easier thanks to the advancements of AI. We've shared stories and images of colorized images and videos many times over the past decade, and colorists say it is designed to bring the past forward for a modern audience. However, there are some historians who believe the process is doing more harm than good.
Here's a fascinating 4-minute video that offers a tiny window into what life in one German town was like back in 1902.
Photo restoration wizard James Berridge made this fascinating 15.5-minute video showing how he used Photoshop to restore and colorize a horribly damaged photo captured 116 years ago in 1903.
In this article, I’m going to tell a story of how we’ve created AI-based restoration project for old military photos.
Photoshop enthusiast Shawn Pollock has been practicing his skills at retouching and colorizing old B&W photos in recent days, and while searching for historical photos to work on, he came across this photo of a couple.
Want to turn some old black-and-white photos into color photos? There's an amazing new website called Colourise.sg that'll get the job done for you. It uses deep learning AI to create remarkably realistic results in just seconds with zero work on your part.
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is out with a new highly-acclaimed World War I documentary titled They Shall Not Grow Old. Here's a 5-minute look at how Jackson colorized 100-year-old footage to give the world a fresh look at the Great War.
Google is taking to the stage at the Google I/O developer conference this week to show off its new products and technologies, one of which is a new AI-powered version of Google Photos. The new app will feature a host of new intelligent features, including the ability to colorize black-and-white photos with one tap.
Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine once said: "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."
Digital colorizations of historical photos have gotten quite a bit of attention in recent years. Retrographic is a new photo book that brings this concept to physical pages. It's a collection of some of the world's most well-known black-and-white historical photos transformed into living color.
We've shared some impressive work by photo colorizers who use Photoshop skills and hard work to add realistic colors into historical monochrome photos. If you're wondering how its done, check out this 7-minute video by Vox that discusses the process. (Note: there's a bit of strong language.)
Marina Amaral is a 21-year-old Brazilian retoucher who is receiving widespread acclaim for her work adding color to famous historical B&W photos.
Accurately colorizing a photo usually takes hours upon hours of research followed by the same in Photoshop. But now, thanks to fancy new neural network technology, you can do an amazing job in no time.
Colorizing old black-and-white photos with Photoshop has been a popular subject on the Internet over the past few years, as skilled retouchers use their time and skills to offer a new view of vintage images. In the future, though, software may be able colorize B&W photos with the click of a button.
Did you know that the Hubble Space Telescope is only able to capture black-and-white photos? In order to capture a maximum amount of information in their space photos, NASA captures multiple black-and-white images using different filters in the camera. These images are then combined in post to create the iconic color photographs that you see published by the space agency.
The video above shows how NASA goes about colorizing the photos by compositing the individual shots.
Dana Keller has made a name for himself as a talented photo colorizer, using his Photoshop skills to offer an idea of what historical black-and-white photos might have looked like had the photographer been able to shoot in color. The video above is a 6-minute look at how Keller approaches the task of colorization.
This colorization tutorial by IceFlowStudios is actually a couple of years old now, but we only just now stumbled across it and we just had to share. In it, Howard Pinsky demonstrates an incredibly quick and easy (albeit somewhat limited) way to colorize a black and white image.
Colorized historical images are very popular in the photo community, but how exactly does one start colorizing photos? Getting to the skill level demonstrated by the Photoshoppers in Reddit's ColorizedHistory subreddit will take countless hours of practice, but if you want to start this Tutorial from Tuts+ is a great primer.
Earlier today, we showed you some of the impressive work the Photoshoppers of Reddit's r/ColorizedHistory community have been putting together. In case you read that post and though "I'd like to try that!" the short tutorial above by 19-year-old r/ColorizedHistory contributor Mads Madsen is a great place to start.
Digital image editing technology -- culturally controversial uses aside -- has enabled us to do some pretty amazing things. In the past, we shared a video that showed how the Internet came together to restore a WWII veteran's Navy photo to its former glory.
This time, we get to see the process in action, as Redditor thehatersalad shows us the impressive restoration and colorization work he did on an old photo of user f2ISO100's grandmother -- time-lapse style.
Earlier this year, we shared some amazing work by Swedish retoucher Sanna Dullaway, who takes historical B&W photographs and colorizes them. YouTube user IColoredItForYou is another master of restoring, retouching, and colorizing, but what's awesome about his work is that he creates behind-the-scenes videos showing how the edits are done. The above time-lapse video shows how he recently used Photoshop to colorize Margaret Bourke-White's famous 1937 photograph, titled "Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky".