I’ve written before about colourizng black and white photos. Anyway, I’ve found a new online tool to give it a try, Image Colorizer, and wanted to share the results, as well as a how to guide for the App, Picture Colorizer.
Is this the best tool to convert black and white photos to colour?
I’ve made all my before and after test images available for you to check out and decide for yourself for your needs. Turning black and white photos or footage to colour used to be something that needed very high end software, and skilled operators. But like all technologies, what was once high end eventually becomes mainstream and accessible by almost anyone. Tools to convert monochrome to colour is now one of those things.
I decided to run some tests to see how good ImageColorizer’s technology is at converting black and white to colour. I started with some colour photos I’ve shot digitally on my Leica M. Then, I simply removed all the colour information from them by desaturating them in Photoshop. I uploaded the black and white image to Image Colorizer to see how it would read the image and how closely it would match to the original colour one.
Is it easy to use?
ImageColorizer.com is easy to use. Just upload the image you want to colourise and let it do its magic. It is fairly generous, you can upload up to 3000px by 3000px and 5mb and the final result you download has no watermark.
Is it an accurate result for colouring old or black and white photos?
I wanted to test this out. For different skin tones, urban and country landscapes, as well as general street photos.
This first set was used to test skin tones. Ten out of ten for how Image Colorizer renders skin tones. What tripped it up a bit was all the colours for the toys in the rest of the photo, but it is clear the online tool recognises skin colours and renders them correctly based on this test.
Similarly, this urban landscape challenged the tool a bit. The multi coloured graffiti is a bit desaturated, but the normal colours of the vegetation, sky and the street is accurate.
This one was the most impressive. It is clear the tool did a really good job of matching the original colour photo. But, a lot of these online tools tend to just overlay a colour on different elements of the picture and that tends to bleed over the edges so you end up with lots of mushy splodges. This proves that Image Colourizer isn’t like that.
How about Black and White Film Photos to Colour?
I’m excited. So I decided to try this a bit more with some photos I shot on Ilford black and white film.
I shot this originally in black and white on Ilford. There was never any colour information in the original photograph. I know that the wooden hut has a lot of green stuff on it, and Image Colorizer picked up on that, and actually, overall has impressed me by how it has brought colour information into a new image. We can see all the different tones for the wood on the hut, in the trees and overall it is good. The multi colours of the furniture hasn’t come through accurately, but overall all the natural colours are good.
Again, Image Colorizer has got the natural, and people colours right. The building is red brick, so it didn’t get that quite right.
I was wondering how it was going to handle this image. It was originally a bit over exposed and not very well hand developed so there isn’t a lot of differentiation in the tones of the image. That’s normal for a lot of older photos. So this image proves to me that Image Colorizer has done a good job at identifying the different elements and colouring them.
What is Picture Colorizer?
Picture Colorizer is a newly launched desktop app by the same geniuses that allows you to colorize any type of black and white images.
Restore damaged images and make adjustments
It’s an advanced and extremely efficient tool that offers you the old photo restoration option, so you can fix up scratches and marks. Also, with online tools, you can’t make that many adjustments to how the colorization process will work out, but with the desktop app, you can. Using this advanced software, you can not only colorize and optimize the old pictures automatically but also you can even adjust various parameters of the image as well.
The tool comes in extremely handy and useful when you have black and white images and you want to make them colorized.
A quick look at the key features of Picture Colorizer and the Final Verdict
It’s easy to use, it’s free, it’s automated, and it offers high-quality results.
I’ve enjoyed the results I’ve gotten so far.
