Website offers free, reasonable AI colorizing for old photos

     Colorizing black-and-white photos is almost as old as photography itself, with people striving to make pictures look more lifelike.

    In the past, it usually involved meticulous hand painting of photos, a task that got relatively easier with digital photo editing software.

    Now, one of the new features in Photoshop is colorizing photos using artificial intelligence algorithms to do the heavy lifting. The results are fairly impressive, although there are naturally a few goofs that are relatively easier to fix compared to trying to colorize an entire picture.

    But suppose you don't have Photoshop, or the "Jack Sparrow" version you're using disables Adobe's Neural Filters?

    Vertexshare's Picture Colorizer offers a free AI-based colorization service that produces acceptable results. I played around with it for an evening and got some decent results.

    Here is a photo of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant taken from the Civil War. First, the original:

 

   And here's the colorized version (the only thing I did with the photo was just colorize it):

     It wasn't perfect, but things such as Grant's hand, his left boot and that yellow spot on the tent can be easily fixed in editing software.

    The main caveat with the service is that it only works with jpgs and pngs, and they can't be larger than 5 mb and 3,000 x 3,000 pixels. You might have to resize the image you want to colorize, as well as finish off any other edits you want to do, before uploading it. 

Television offers way to create backdrops, sets for product, model photo shoots

     Caleb Pike, over at the DSLR Shooter on Youtube offers a way to set up backgrounds or even animated sets for shooting product photos, models or action figures.

    Pike recommends using a flat-screen television. In his case, he uses a 55-inch 4k TV screen that has built-in Roku, allowing him to cast photos or animations on to the screen.

    He uses it as both a tabletop, where he projected heads-up display-style graphics around his subjects, or created animations that helped light it up. The TV he used was durable enough to put a mirrorless camera body on, but he suggested getting a plexiglass sheet to protect more delicate screens.

    The other way is to use it as a backdrop, putting up an image to serve as the background, which can be adjusted for perspective and lighting through a linked phone.

    Pike also offers a few things to look for when picking a TV, or a monitor, and how to get the best photo possible in the process.