
Bringing black and white photos to life using Colourise.sg - sohkamyung
https://blog.data.gov.sg/bringing-black-and-white-photos-to-life-using-colourise-sg-435ae5cc5036
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priansh
This seems really cool; I think it would be even better if they adopted head
and tail models similar to how style2paints does it for colorizing manga.

Style2Paints:
[https://github.com/lllyasviel/style2paints](https://github.com/lllyasviel/style2paints)

It does increase memory consumption by a lot but idk, the improvement to
performance is a little nuts

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ackbar03
Style 2 paints is pretty sophisticated. This thing not so much. I feel like
they just took some model and trained it on a specific dataset and called it
"new"

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remarkEon
Tangentially related: if you have the chance to go see Peter Jackson’s _They
Shall Not Grow Old_ then do so. What he managed to do with that old footage is
simply incredible. I was left in absolute awe at how he and his team were able
to bring that black and white footage to life...not to mention the gravity of
the subject matter.

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Markoff
except they didn't just colorize them, but more importantly fixed FPS

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mc32
When Ted Turned tried “democratizing” old classic B&W movies he was made fun
of, a lot, not by the audience/viewers, but by the professional critics who
claimed he was ruining the intrinsic art of those movies, the implication was
he was degenerating them.

Sure, the colors were not quite right (I think they improved them after
initial missteps), but he was a man ahead of his time with his vision in that
regard. Few would bat an eye today.

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rangibaby
Black and white movies should stay black and white. George Lucas shouldn’t
have messed with Star Wars. Film movies should have film grain. You shouldn’t
use a computer to remove grain and make Arnold look like a Madame Tussaud’s
sculpture. You shouldn’t crop 4:3 sources to 16:9 because you think people
prefer losing some image to black bars. Stop tinkering with shit to “improve”
it.

I wouldn’t care, but I do care because it means I have to spend my time taking
hours on the internet to find an obscure VHS rip of a version that has not
been debauched by digital Dicks.

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bscphil
I mean, I agree with you, but I don't think GP overstated at all just how much
the average consumer doesn't care about this stuff. Most of us know people who
_prefer_ to have their TV _stretch_ (not just crop) the image from its
original aspect ratio to 16:9. I know people who refuse to watch black and
white films because they're "boring". Not because of the subject matter, but
because they're black and white.

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swiliam1968
black and white photos are already alive. colour doesn't make the better

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anonytrary
Funny, I bet dozens of people said that exact same thing to Maxwell and Sutton
before they invented color photography.

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santafe
Aaand it works surprisingly well with color photos. It can remove the insta
filters and the overdriven HDR effects. Great work!

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bowmessage
> none of these tools have been trained to colour images specific to the
> Singaporean historical context.

Interesting aspect of image colorization that I hadn't given too much thought
to. Will this NN for example handle images taken in different historical
contexts, and vice versa?

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pjmlp
Cool technical achievement, however many pictures are B&W even in the age of
colour for a reason, the meaning changes with colour, the sentiments that one
as artistic wants to awake on the viewer aren't the same in the presence of
colour.

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sandworm101
This isnt cool. These are not accurate. To properly judge any colorization you
have to compare against real color photos. Take a color photo, convert it to
b+w. Then feed it to the colorization bot. Compare the original to the
colorized. It never comes out very accurate. So you know that neither are the
historical photos.

Converting b+w to color is like taking a photo and making it into a 3d model.
No matter how hard you try, you are inventing data. It isnt a revitalized
photo, it is a new piece, an interpretation of the original. Call it computer
art, not history.

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24gttghh
Tell me this documentary won't change your mind:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds)

(They Shall Not Grow Old)

