Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve seen some pretty epic examples of manual photo restoration and colorization. But there’s now a website that promises equally impressive results. MyHeritage uses neural networks to restore your old photos and give them color. And judging from the examples, it truly does a pretty good job for artificial intelligence.
Olga Shirnina, also known as Klimbim, is one of the leading colorization artists who gives new life to historic images. However, her work has been banned from Facebook and Instagram several times now. Since September last year, her accounts have been suspended multiple times for posting images that depict “dangerous organizations.”
Photo restoration and colorization gives new life and new dimension to damaged old photographs. A recent video from James Berridge of JBColourisation shows just how impressive this process can be. He used a heavily damaged diptych of mother and her baby from circa 1903, with the damage splitting the image apart. In his timelapse video, you can see how he fixed it and “reunited” the mother and her child after 116 years.
Colorization and restoration of old photos is a painstaking and time-consuming process, especially if you’re working with heavily damaged images. Computer vision team of Mail.ru Group has introduced an AI-powered tool that will make his process simpler and easier. They’ve even launched a website where you can test it out and restore the vintage photos from your old family album. Or any other vintage photos, if you prefer.
We have seen several AI-based colorizing tools so far, and colourise.sg is the latest addition to this bunch. While some other services like Algorithmia still need to improve, colourise.sg is capable of doing a fantastic job in only a matter of seconds.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I’s end, a documentary titled They Shall Not Grow Old has been released. Directed and produced by Peter Jackson, it contains footage you have never seen before, restored and colorized to add a new dimension to these striking shots.
In this video by BBC, you can hear about the painstaking process the crew went through and what it took to colorize the shots and create this amazing documentary.
At yesterday’s 2018 I/O keynote, Google has introduced some interesting improvements to Google Photos. One of the features I found the most interesting is that Google Photos will soon be able to colorize your old black and white photos with a single click. Other than that, there are a few other new features that let you improve or share photos in a second.
“There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work” – Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940)
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer, whose work was instrumental in changing child labour laws in the United States.
Hine is my favourite photographer. Aside from being technically excellent, his black and white photographs are some of the most important ever taken. His record of the first half of the 20th century is a unique glimpse into the real lives of working class America, and his work for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was instrumental in bringing about change for the nation’s children.
At this year’s Adobe MAX conference, Adobe has introduced some interesting new tech they’re developing. One of them is Adobe Scribbler – software that doesn’t only automatically colorize black and white images, but also adds shades and texture. While other similar programs still need to improve, Adobe Scribbler seems to give pretty amazing results, judging from the preview.
We’ve recently learned that you can edit videos in Lightroom, at least as the “first aid.” Nathaniel Dodson of Tutvid demonstrates another unconventional use of Lightroom – colorizing black and white images. He turns a black and white photo into color using only Adjustment Brush and the adjustments within this tool. So if Lightroom is your editing tool of choice – check out this tutorial.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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