Coloring a black and white photo has never been easier. In fact, now you can colorize a black and white photo in seconds thanks to artificial intelligence. Colourise SG is a simple web app out of Singapore that enables you to upload one image at a time, and it will colorize it for you.
You can see the original photo here.
Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar
Don’t you wish it was sometimes easy to convert a black and white photo to color or a lot of black and white photos to color. Hey, this is Scott Wyden Kivowitz, a storyteller with a camera talking about all the things photographers like you and I are thinking about in this video, I want to show you a really cool website, a really cool tool that uses artificial intelligence to colorize your photographs. There are developers out of Singapore that have created a really cool tool which will convert your black and white photos. Two color photographs do. This tool does not get color a hundred percent accurate 100% of the time because it’s artificial intelligence. It has to rely on objects that it sees in the photographs to colorize the rest of the photos and it doesn’t colorize photos in bulk. You have to do it one by one. Even if you do a hundred photos one by one, it’s still saving you hours of colorizing time because you’re not doing it manually.
You’re letting the software do it for you. I published new videos every Monday and Thursday whenever possible. So click that subscribe button below. Now if you want to see more videos like this one and karate kick that notification bell so you are notified when an individual goes live. And also quick thank you to Mack or buy warranty for partnering with me on this video because without them I am not making videos. So there you go. Check out macro a warranty. So let’s head over to the computer so you can see exactly what I’m talking about. This is colourise.Sg and this website as you can see, shows you, you know, photo before and after and you can try this for yourself. And again, it’s one by one and I’m going to show you three photos and, and how and how cool is really can be.
So first things first you have to click this capture thing. In order to do this, I’m going to start with a photo of my biological father when he was six years old, literally on a sixth birthday. And I’m going to just drop this in here and it’s going to show me a before and after of this photograph. I’ll start with the before and you can see it’s just a dark black and white photo. You can tell it’s on his birthday, six years old, and you just have to grab that slider wreck where here it is. And then you can see as I colorize it now it has color and you can see he’s wearing a blue shirt or a shirt with a blue blue tint. It could be completely blue. Again, the software is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job at figuring out skin tone, hair color, lip color.
It can recognizes what color those should be. So it figures out the photo based on that. And you can see that even the balloons have color and the tablecloths. So, uh, there’s one example right there. You know, it’s doing really good job of colorizing a photo of my biological father on his sixth birthday. The next photo I’m going to show you is one of my grandparent’s house and it is a photo probably from a uh, forties 50s. This is another one that is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job to give you an idea of what the colors were. This is my grandparents’ house and you can see there’s two classic cars in here. And that’s the reason why I wanted to do this cause I was curious what color these cars were. Now, uh, if there was some detail in the sky, which there’s not because this is a very old photo that was already fading, plus I had to scan it so it, there’s no dynamic range in this photo.
But if there was, it would be able to pull the sky color from here. Plus based on the tree, it should be able to figure out that some of the colors of the tree and whatnot. So let’s go ahead and grab this slider and start colorizing. And you can see it did start figuring out the grass. We can see there’s some grays and blues. You can see some color in the house, some green and the grass over there. But as you can see, the sky is not changing. So this is where colorize is not perfect, right? It’s, it’s given me an idea of what the colors were, but it’s not filling in all the details cause there’s just, there was no details in the print in the first place. And there we go. Here is the colored version. Now again, think about this. If you were to do this, manually would take you hours to colorize a photo, whereas in seconds it did it for us.
The next photo I’m going to show you should have an impact on you because of what the photo is. The photo is actually one that is in the Holocaust museum. It is one that my wife’s grandfather is in. Okay. It’s when, uh, they were actually liberated from a concentration camp. This is the photo, this is her grandfather over here in that, in a long, a long trench coat. And the caption is inmates waving a homemade homemade American flag, uh, to greet the u s seventh army troops upon their arrival. At the AALAC concentration camp. This photo, uh, like I said, it’s in Holocaust museum and it is big. It is a, uh, it’s an impactful photo because it’s literally them waving a whole main American flag. Um, they’re happy. There’s, there’s sadness, there’s Yo, when you see this in color, okay, your is going to be even more impactful than the black and white photo.
Uh, now I’m going to upload this. Um, if you’re sensitive to this type of thing, just skip ahead. Uh, but if you’re okay seeing this, then, you know. Thanks rich. Thanks for sticking around. I just wanted to share how good call wise could be when there’s a lot of detail in the photo in an objects that are really recognizable. Now I think that if this American flag was not homemade, that if it was, uh, a perfect American flag and you could see it perfectly in the photo, I think that the color, would it be even better. But with that said, it’s pretty darn good when you see this result, even with a homemade American flag. So here we go. It’s worth noting that colorize works best with large photos. If you do one that’s tiny, it’s not going to do as well as it would with a large photo.
So actually got this from the Holocaust Museum, uh, their, their website because that’s where it’s, it’s even larger than the skin that we actually had in the family. Okay, so here’s the black and white photo. Again, this is my wife’s grandfather and there’s a bunch, a lot of other people you can see there’s, there’s happy faces, there’s, you know, sort of monotone faces. There’s the American, the whole American flag and you know, a lot of great things. Okay, now check out the color version. You can now see colors of the clothing, the skin tones, you can see how dirty they actually are. And you can see the American flag in color. You can see the sky, how blue was that day. So this is colorize dot. S G again, it’s a developers out of Singapore that used apparently Singapore military software code. And it adopted into this sort of prototype of what could be.
Now hopefully companies like Topaz and Skyler boom. And Antoine and all of these companies that are experimenting with artificial intelligence in photography software can use the technology like this and included in their software in bulk. Because now, if that’s possible, you can now colorize hundreds of thousands of black and white photographs in seconds each, not hundreds in a second, but like, you know, maybe a hundred seconds, something like that. So next time that you have a black and white photo that you want to colorize consider checking out colorize.sg because I am freaking impressed with how well it can colorize the photos, even if it’s one by one. Thanks for watching. Thanks for subscribing, and I’ll see you in the next video.
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