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.   

How to get rid of people (with Photoshop)

    Almost every photographer has experienced this: You want to get pictures of a building or a landscape and there's too many people around.

    I've had times when I just wanted to unload a fire-extinguisher-sized can of pepper spray on people who were ruining my otherwise good shot. But there are a couple ways to make the crowds disappear that won't get you a criminal record.

    However, both require an investment of time — and a tripod.

    The first involves the oldest camera trick in the world. It's how early photographers got cityscapes in broad daylight that were devoid of people: Long exposure.

    Back in the day when ISO, if it could have been measured, was in the single-to-low-double digits, a photograph could take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two to expose. Most people walking about in such a photo would not register on the plate. Only people who didn't move too much would show up as ghosts, though.

    We can achieve the same effect today, even with cameras that have faster sensitivity levels at their lowest end than Louis Daguerre could have imagined possible.

    First, mount your camera on a tripod. Unless you are dead, you won't be able to hold it still long enough.

    Second, stop down your lens as far as you can and then, if that's not getting you a speed slow enough, put on a neutral-density filter. Variable ND filters, either professional or one you make yourself, will let you adjust it to get the slow speed you want.

    (If you really want to go hard-core, use a piece of welding glass, but just remember that you'll have to do some serious white-balance adjustment later.)

    Third, use a remote shutter release to take the picture, and if it works out, it should look like a ghost town.

    The other way allows you to use more normal shutter speeds but gets you the same result, although it may take more time.

    With your camera mounted on a tripod (because you don't want the camera moving around between pictures), take a series of pictures of your subject, making sure that you get people in different spots as you take pictures. Here's the set I shot while visiting The Alamo recently.

    If you notice, there's always somebody in the picture, but they're not always standing at the same spot. That's going to be important in just a bit.

    Bring the photos into Photoshop as layers in the same document and then auto-align your layers. Even if you did this on a tripod, this eliminates any accidental jostling of the camera between shots.

    Then, create a smart object with your pictures and, after it has finished that task, set the stacking mode to median. When you do this, Photoshop looks at your pixels as values, and as it compares the different pictures, it will use the pixel that is the average of the collection. What this means is that it will more often than not pick the pixel that has nobody in it and leave you with a scene devoid of people.

    It's not a perfect process. In my pictures, the guy in the red shirt didn't move far enough in two pictures, so there was some residual red left on the stones. Plus, the flag was fluttering a bit, which created some interesting ghosting. But the fix is to go back inside the smart object, find a clear spot for that section of the image and copy and paste it into the final picture, making sure you feather it sufficiently so that it doesn't look like a kid used a cutout and that paste-like glue they used to have in elementary schools that you applied with a tongue depressor.

    This is what I got:

Look, Ma, no tourists.

Doing long exposures without a tripod or neutral-density filters

    In the last entry, I told you how to make a variable neutral-density filter so you can get long-exposure photos even in broad daylight.

    Now, I'll show you how to do it without using a filter, or even a tripod for that matter. I found this tip on Digital Photography School, and I found it works beautifully for the most part.

    I'll give you the tl;dr version of the article: Take multiple pictures of a scene, load them into Photoshop as layers, convert them into a smart object and then set your stack mode to "mean", which will cause the moving elements to blur, giving you the long-exposure effect you're looking for.

    Here's an example I did. If you're a fan of "Twin Peaks," you'll recognize Snoqualmie Falls.

I shot this with a shutter speed of 1/6 of a second, and while it blurs the water somewhat, it wasn't what I was hoping for. So, I took about 11 more pictures, with the same setting and then merged them.

This is the finished result.

    As you can see the water has a much smoother effect that would normally be the result of a much longer exposure than I could have got under the existing conditions. It is more of what I was looking for.

    So now you have another tool you can use when you want to get a long-exposure effect.