Show HN: I made a new AI colorizer

Awesome job! This makes me a bit envious. I am hobbyist colorizer [1] who did it the old school way (with tools like Affinity Photo and lot of manual work). I tried de-oldify and other tools but I justified my work thinking how horrible they were but pallette.fm is way too good. Not sure if I would find the motivation to restore old photos anymore. Glad that this was just a small hobby for me and I had just started learning the ropes.

But I would be dead scared if I was a professional[2] who did this full-time. Is this what AI taking your job feels like?

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/experiments/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vubuBrcAwtY

emilwallner · 3 years ago

ty! i'm glad you enjoy the tool. As for whether or not this tool could replace a professional colorist, I think it depends on the specific project. For some projects, Palette could do a great job of automatically colorizing photos, and for others, a professional colorist would still be necessary to get the best results. Especially when the projects require historical accuracy or a high aesthetic standard. it also makes colorization more accessible, which leads to more opportunities to refine results manually or say print the results.

Valgrim · 3 years ago

Even if the results are not 100% historically perfect, 99% of the hard job is done. Skin tones, plants, skies, water... they all look incredibly good, and the object segmentation is almost perfect too.

The tool seems to struggle with fabrics, but that part is by far the easiest to fix with a traditional photo editor.

Congrats man. You made my mom happy this evening. Please keep a free tier on your tool.

Klaster_1 · 3 years ago

Ten years ago at my first job I used to colorize photos professionally, seeing how this tedious process has been automated away brings me the same joy as when you automate a routine with a shell script.

throwaway290 · 3 years ago

Could it have been trained on work of people like you?

Very cool.

Your results look much better than the washed out AI colorization that I've seen in the past.

I think you could charge money for this service.

A suggestion for something fun to do / marketing tool: recolorize this video frame-by-frame https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw

Feature request: colorize B&W comic books. I really want to create a full color book of Calvin & Hobbes comics. (Not for publication)

emilwallner · 3 years ago

Thanks! yeah, a few people have used the tool to colorize videos, frame by frame. For example Lord of the flies (1963): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8eiho4

Although, I'd recommend colorizing a few key frames and then use https://github.com/zhangmozhe/Deep-Exemplar-based-Video-Colo...

Cool, yeah, my next model will be better for comic books. You can also use the 'Surprise Me' button in the editor and you'll get some decent results.

callumprentice · 3 years ago

Thank you so much Emil - I have some old photos B/W of my dad who is no longer with us and have wanted to colorize them somehow for years. The results from just dropping the photos on your page - no tweaking or whatnot - are incredible and have me in tears.

Amazing work.

loceng · 3 years ago

I can't remember the name but there's a Reddit subreddit where people can post photos to request colorization, so that may be an option if you're curious what some passionate volunteers might do for you.

Great suggestion - thank you.

nathell · 3 years ago

Comments like this are what make me come back to HN. I hope the memories are kept alive.

Thank you so much. My daughter is away at camp - I can't wait to show her tomorrow too when she gets back.

shubhamjain · 3 years ago

kristopolous · 3 years ago

I gave it ansel adams photos which it did really well on. Then I tried some famous national geographic photos, like the these: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/meet-...

still impressed

I decided to go really old, so I tried "Valley of the Shadow of Death" from the 1850s where we get some red and blue cannonballs, but that's fine.

1838 Louis Daguerre photo of paris: https://9ol.es/1838.png

1906 Kite aerial of san francisco after the earthquake: http://9ol.es/1906.png

1895 Montparnasse train wreck: http://9ol.es/1895.png

1920 Wall Street bombing: http://9ol.es/1920.png

1920s Park Row skyscrapers: http://9ol.es/parkrow.png

cercatrova · 3 years ago

Nice, maybe I can turn the movie The Lighthouse from black and white into a color motion picture. I hear color "movies" as they call 'em are what's hot these days.

Original: https://i.imgur.com/9CZ7vk1.png

Base Palette: https://i.imgur.com/iTq5H9W.jpeg

bwoodward · 3 years ago

It looks pretty great, actually -- https://i.imgur.com/fxZz6f7.jpg (Base), https://i.imgur.com/2JAHnbe.jpg (Vivid Natural)

I tried it as well (edited my comment above), I like the Base Palette option better, it looks more realistic compared to Vivid Natural which looks like a WW2 movie filter with the brown atmosphere.

waltbosz · 3 years ago

hilyen · 3 years ago

I ran a test with a photo I took if people are curious. It does a great job for guessing, but of course there is room for improvement.

https://i.postimg.cc/Y9dH4GxW/palette-fm-test.jpg

mfgs · 3 years ago

Cool. Interesting to note that the original is not necessarily the "correct" real world color palette (it's accuracy is subject to camera settings, sensor response, lighting, etc), so the colorized version could in theory be even better than the original in some or all areas of the photo.

100% I think my original photo is a bit oversaturated. The real issues I see are where it makes blue things brown and red things green.

npteljes · 3 years ago

As well as there are multiple desaturation methods, GIMP alone offers at least three, and I'm sure that could influence the outcome as well.

https://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-tool-desaturate.html

batuhandirek · 3 years ago

I love how the emphasis on initial letters are understood and colored red!

littlestymaar · 3 years ago

Unfortunately, this has the common bias[1] with IA coloring of making old stuff look dull, reinforcing the Hollywood cliché[2]. The past was actually often very colorful.

[1]: https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/gwenckatz/status/138165207169...

[2]: see this video by a movie props maker about why Hollywood movies make old things look the way they do in movie https://youtu.be/mF1VFlCnLQ4?t=434

tanvach · 3 years ago

Nice UI, and the approach works quite well (occasional wrong choice of palette compared to ground truth). It’s kind of fun to turn my photos into B/W and run through the model to try and guess the output.

Do you have a privacy policy for the uploaded photos? I’m not keen on uploading anything important without knowing how it’s stored or will be used in the future.

cheers! i'm working on a proper privacy policy. I don't store any images that are uploaded. i use google analytics and mixpanel to store user interactions.