How To Color Black And White Photos Step By Step Tutorial

 With a new web application everyone can Color Black And White Photos. The system delivers good results, but fails precisely on the most interesting tasks.

If you browse through old photos that show family members from three generations ago, you can feel a certain distance. One of the reasons for this is that you never met your great-grandmother or great-grandfather. On the other hand, because most of the pictures taken decades ago are black and white.

Since the early days of photography, artists have been trying to overcome this distance: They color the black and white photos. They used to do this in painstaking detail with a brush and pigments. Today they do it with a graphics tablet and Photoshop , which is no less troublesome.

So Let's get started with our How To Color Black And White Photos Step By Step Tutorial

1. The Simple Way

Google long ago announced that it would include an option to colorize your old black and white photos. But now it's finally available. We'll tell you how it works and how to use it.

Do you have an old photo of your grandparents? Or maybe a year ago you pasted the photo you like so much in black and white and now it doesn't seem like a good idea? Well, Google came up with a solution to Google Photos and its new option. colorize 

Colorize your old or black and white photos

Colorize (or  tint ) is the new feature of Google Photos, google photos black and white to color is one of the most searched expressions in this subject. This option uses artificial intelligence to identify the scene in the photo and interpret the colors in such a way that they are automatically colored. This option is still in beta and some users have already tried it. Thats how it works.

At the moment they have withdrawn the option of some beta testers so it cannot be tested at the moment. But those who tried told us how it works. If you click on the option to color it (which was indicated earlier that this is a beta feature), a warning will appear explaining how this new implementation will work. The description is simple:   the color mode analyzes black and white photos and adds color.

If you accept the staining process to begin, it will take a while, but we don't have to wait long. In the end we see the photo in color. The results are quite good, but we can finish modifying the photo with editing either in Google Photos or other editing apps after saving.

While the results are quite good, it is true that it has a vintage effect that sins a bit of orange in some cases. And sometimes it seems like an orange sepia effect rather than a tint. Something that sometimes changes the naturalness of skin tones a little. But in other photos it does surprisingly well. We expect this option to be improved little by little, not only with the final launch of the stable version of the feature, but also the updates it will receive over time.

We look forward to having this option on our phones around the world and continuing to test it. Do you think it will be an app that will "revive" your old photos? Or what is left in a simple anecdote? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

2. The Advanced Photoshop Way

If you prefer photoshop for a more advanced and good looking transformation. We suggest this step by step 5 minutes video that explains How To Colorize a Black and White Photo in Photoshop .

3. A New Algorithm

Color in the photo by algorithm

Computer scientists have therefore long been working on computer programs that could take on this task. The company Algorithmia offers various algorithms that app developers can build into their products. One of these algorithms colorizes black and white photos. Anyone can try it out for free in the new "Colorize Photos" web application .

All you have to do is enter the web address of a photo or upload the image directly to the website and click "Colorize it". The result is a colored version of the original. The results are not as good as those of the hand-colored photos. But you can certainly be seen, as this photo series shows .

If you send pictures of London through the system, the double-decker buses, telephone boxes and the famous Grenadier Guards shine in red. In pictures from New York, the algorithm recognizes the yellow cabs and gives the cars a rich yellow. Only sometimes it is wrong on the road surface. Then it looks like the taxis are driving across a lawn in Manhattan.

Coloring works well with nature photos: forests are green, the sky is blue with white clouds and cows are given a realistic brown. The system has problems with unusual colors, such as the brightly colored uniforms of the Swiss Guard. The algorithm assigns them an indefinable shade of brown.

Noticeable weaknesses in an otherwise interesting system

A look at how it works reveals why the program is sometimes right and sometimes not. The makers have described it in detail in an article : Using a database with a million color photos, an intelligent algorithm learns to recognize and assign structures in images.

But precisely because of this method, the program shows what the computer scientists call "data record one-sidedness". It gets along very well with photos that are similar to those from the exercise data set. However, it has problems with completely different photos.

The computer scientists present examples of this on their website. With pomegranates , parrots and pizzas , the colors are almost perfect. It fails completely with modems and military uniforms . Presumably the program could not learn them because there were particularly few images from these categories in the exercise data set.

This leads to the most noticeable weakness of the otherwise interesting system: of all things, historical photos, for which coloring was invented in the first place, cannot cope. It stains them pale, false, or just gives them a sepia tint.

The reason for this should again lie in the exercise data set. There are simply hardly any color images of historical motifs, because they come from the times of black and white photography. And so apps for coloring also have a distance to the historical images: They also don't know what the world really looked like at that time.

But that doesn't apply to all historical recordings. The algorithm can color old landscape photos quite well. Its makers applied it to the pictures of the influential American landscape photographer Ansel Adams. The results seem realistic . The same applies to pictures by the famous photo reporter Henri Cartier-Bresson, who also photographed in black and white.

It cannot be said that coloring improves these images in any way. It also does not provide any real information, but only shows a plausible color version of the black and white photos. This makes it a nice gimmick for anyone who wants to know what the world might have looked like on these recordings.

This was our "How To Color Black And White Photos Step By Step Tutorial" article for you. I hope you enjoyed! Don't forget to leave us your question down below in the comments. We would love to hear from you.