Auto-Colorize a B&W Photo? What an Awful Idea
When I think about my black and white photography being auto colorized by some soul less algorithm I cringe, then I get annoyed. Then I guess a little angry at the idea. At risk of coming off all prickly artist, I take a lot of care with my work. I started with B&W Tri-X back when, 70’s & 80’s. For a long time I just shot color. Having gone back to it, the tonal qualities are carefully done. Maybe minutes, maybe hours of work to get it just so. I usually work in color, when I do choose monochrome well, it’s not for nothing that I made that choice. I don’t want that messed with. Can’t stop anyone of course. But for the record-Nope. Not by people, and certainly not by mere math.
I’ll let my own work show why.
Math can’t really do what quite I did above. Not with my images and most likely not for yours.
This is a little too nuanced for a simple poll, so I encourage the reader to chime in with a comment or insight of your own.
To test the system they created, the scientists found human test subjects and showed them two versions of photos — one would be the real color photo, and the other would be one that artificially colorized by the software. The humans were asked to figure out which was which.
20% of the photo pairs actually fooled the humans, meaning the colorized versions were guessed as the real color photos — this “fool rate” is much higher than prior research in this area.
More: Photoshop of the Future May Be Able to Auto-Colorize a B&W Photo