There is no doubt that artificial intelligence has made it easier to perform an ever-increasing number of tasks…
This is particularly the case for the processing of photographs and in particular for the task of colorizing a black and white photo. Long carried out manually, the colorization of photos or films is a long and tedious process. But for some time now, sites that allow you to do it in just a few clicks thanks to AI have become more and more promising. We had already talked about Colorize!, ColoruriseSG or Deep AI Colorizer. Here now Paddles a free coloring tool created by Emil Wallner who works with Google Arts.
Colorize a black and white photo with Palette
With Palette, colorizing an image is an extremely simple task to do and the results are really successful. The cherry on the cake is that you don't need to have great editing skills to make your black and white photos take on color. It's a very simple tool to use.
The first thing you need to do is go to the Palette website. Then you will need to upload the black and white image you want to colorize to the website.
The site does not give specific information about the characteristics and dimensions that the images you want to process must have. But it seems that this free tool offers quite a bit of freedom. It can indeed colorize a black and white photo up to 24 megapixels in almost any image format… only TIFF does not seem to work.
Once online, you will have to wait a few seconds for the AI to do its job and colorize the photo. The site will then offer you a first result under the name of "Base palette". If you are satisfied with the result, a "Download" button allows you to download the image. It will be saved in PNG format with a dimension of 1920 pixels. The site does not offer settings to modify the size of the result or its format.
On the other hand, if the coloring does not suit you, the site offers a whole series of variations that you can test in turn: lavender dusk, colorful memories, vivid natural… In all, around twenty different colorings that will play in particular on the intensity of the colors.
Here is a first example with the Himalayas… we can clearly see that the variations can really change the rendering:
Second attempt with a Parisian metro entrance signed Guimard:
And the result that I find the most impressive is in this photo of a girl and a motorbike… we don't even suspect that it has been colorized:
Another rather surprising aspect of palette is that you can describe how you want the color and lighting to be applied to the image and see the result, which gives this tool similar qualities to Dall-E but with color. All you have to do is describe in good French or good English what you want to see: lighting, dominant colors, clothing colors, etc.
For example, if you want the people in the photo to all be dressed in red, you just have to indicate: "all clothes in red"... that's it. And the worst part is that it really works (more or less) but sometimes you have to do several tests.
Colorize Black and White Photos with Palette's Twitter Bot
For Twitter fans, there is also a Palette bot that allows you to colorize photos directly from the social network.
To do this, simply quote a tweet with an image, reply to a tweet with an image, or post an image on Twitter mentioning the account. @palettefm_bot. After a few seconds, the bot will respond by offering you 4 variations of your colorized image…
For the little rascals, there is even a version for adult photos (@palettefm_nsfw)…
Not bad, right? What do you think?
