Hack lets you use photo editor to get full-resolution AI colorized photos

     In an earlier post, I talked about Vertexshare's Picture Colorizer, which does a reasonably good job of turning black-and-white photos into color pictures.

    But the site has some limitation, in that you can only submit a photo that has been resized to no more than 3,000 pixels on the long edge. That can be a pain in the butt.

    However, there is a way to get a full-resolution AI-colored photo for no cost, and it will work with any photo editor that uses layers.

    Unmesh Dinda, who does some of the best Photoshop tutorials over at Piximperfect on Youtube, unveiled this hack involving Palette.fm, an AI-based photo colorization site that he said is better than Photoshop's neural filter.

    Palette gives you several options, and you can edit it by changing the word prompt for the AI.

    But it won't let you download the full resolution image that you uploaded, unless you are willing to pay either 65 cents per image or sign up for a subscription plan. The free option gives you essentially a file slightly bigger than a thumbnail.

    Dinda, in his video, demonstrates how to take that tiny picture and use it to make a full-resolution colorized photo. The secret is in layers and blending modes.

    As you'll see in his video, Dinda will add the colorized download as a layer over the original photo, and then use the transform tool to stretch it to the same size as the original, lining it up perfectly. You can turn down the opacity to make sure you're getting it straight.

    At this point, it's going to look terrible with pixelated artifacts all over the place. But, by using the color blend mode, the color patterns will be transferred to the full-resolution image, giving you a high-quality colorized picture.

    I again called the photo of Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor into service to demonstrate this. This is the final result, following Dinda's steps. I did this in Photoshop, but I also tried it in GIMP, a free, open-source photo image editor that is comparable to Photoshop.   

    This is straight out of Photoshop. I would likely go back and touch up Grant's uniform and maybe his chair. But if you need or want to colorize a photo, this gives you a good starting point that can be tweaked.

    Dinda said it can also be used for correcting extreme color casts, as he shows in the video below, where he compares the results with Photoshop and MyHeritage.com.   

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.