How to Use AI to Turn Your Old Black and White Photos into Colour Photos

How to Use AI to Turn Your Old Black and White Photos into Colour Photos

Have you got any old photos of yourself or maybe your parents or grandparents that you have always wished were in colour? Or perhaps you have someone that likes to take grayscale photos of everything because they think it adds a touch of class to them or something that you wish they were in colour instead?

Well now thanks Artificial Intelligence you can!

The new free Colorize Photos app from #Algorithmia uses Deep Learning to automatically colourize black and white photos. You can upload your b&w photos or paste a URL to where they are online such as your Flickr page or someone's Instagram photo or something and it will automatically colorize them for you!

Once the AI processes the image which only takes a few seconds, it will display your b&w alongside a coloured version of them side by side with a slider to compare them.

Black and White New York City Wallpaper

Colorized New York City Wallpaper.

You'll notice that on the site it says that it uses a Deep Learning AI algorithm along with a database of millions of images to do the colourization of turning your old or new black and white photos into colour photos. Bringing them much more to life.

According to the demo page, the app uses "Deep learning to automatically colourize black and white photos", which basically means it uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to "learn" to colour in black and white photos with the right colour.

Something that it is still learning to do perfectly as the processed photo isn't exactly perfect for some photos depending on the complexity of the photo itself. Sometimes the hue and saturation is a little off and probably not the right colour exactly.

Still, I've tried it a few times on my own old black and white photos and although not 100% perfect each time, it's still amazing and really brings them to life! It's just amazing to see your old b&w photos in colour like that.

However, sometimes the colourization process might be a little more than a little off. In some photos of my grandmother who definitely had white hair back then gave her glistening blonde which I wish she was around to see now that would be fun!

Of course, turning old black and white photos into colour photos has always been possible before. But you usually had to pay for that and it's not dirt cheap. Especially if you have a lot of photos. However, these professional photo colourization services do do a much better job of it and the colors will be much more accurate.

This black and white lion photo for example colorized.

That's a side by side one of what you see on the site.
Here's another showing the black and white version and the colorized version too.

The colourized version.


As you can see, the colors aren't exactly perfect? However, it's free and it's still learning so in the future, after it's processed and colorized a billion b&w photos, it may get better and be much more accurate.

Still in the mean time it's a lot of fun to play around with to see your old b&w photos brought to life in colour like you've never seen before!

Plus it's free so you can't complain only praise!

The app itself is the brainchild of Richard Zhang, Phillip Isola and Alexei A. Efros from the University of California who only created this just as part of a research paper. If this is what came about just as part of that research, I can't even begin to think about what they'll release.

Enough reading! Start colouring!

Try the Colorize Photos app from Algorithmia for yourself.

Hope you find it useful and will enjoy using it.

If you like this post click the thumbsup!

Mike.