This website uses an automated algorithm to colorize your black and white images
Algorithmia uses a deep learning algorithm to easily add color to black and white images. Paste a URL into the box or upload an image, wait a short processing time and the colorized result is displayed.
The service displays a side-by-side comparison of the original black and white and colorized image. Drag the vertical purple line to show more or less of the color or black and white parts of the converted image to see what it will look like before download.
Finished images can be downloaded as either the comparison image or the complete colorized image, both of which will have the colorize-it watermark in the lower right corner. Downloading the comparison image will display the image wherever the purple line is. If you move the purple line to cover a third of the image, that's how it will look after it's been downloaded. The default is half original image and half colorized image.
The service isn't perfect and can produce some interesting and unusual results. Most of the images I tried came out well with varying results on the rest. Sometimes the service takes a bit long to process the images, the longest I experienced was around 15 seconds. That could be a slow internet connection or the algorithm processing images.
Overall results tend to lean toward the sepia/yellow tones when the algorithm doesn't recognize something, or it will add areas of off color to an image.
This isn't a serious colorization tool like you would find in an advanced graphics program. There aren't any options to make adjustments to the colors or areas on the image, but it's fun to use and the results are often well done.
On an interesting note, the service will colorize either one side of the image or the other depending on what browser you use. Firefox based browsers have the colorized result on the left side of the image. Chrome based browsers show the image colorized results on the right.
You can try any of the five sample images to see how the service works before you colorize any of your own images. I used black and white images from Pixabay and Pexels, two favorite free image sites. Algorithmia has other projects in the Case Gallery you can demo for free, like scene recognition, image tagger, deep style transfer, and more. The Deep Style Transfer has some interesting artistic effects that you can apply to any images you want to use. If you want an online tool that will colorize black and white images, works fairly quickly and is easy to use you might want to give it a try.
Colorize Photos at Algorithmia
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Comments
Had some fun with this. Thanks.
I uploaded a screenshot from an old black & white western movie. The image was a landscape with cattle and cowboys etc. The result was pretty good but as far as getting what I'd guess the correct colours would be but overall a bit washed out.
Next I uploaded an image of another landscape, one which had been in colour but I had used greyscale to make it black & white. The results weren't that great. The original colour image featured a brown car in the foreground, pine trees to the left, a signpost with red paint on it to the right and in the background snow covered hills. The result after colorizing was a grey car, dark coloured sign (can't really detect what colour it is, pine trees okay but green colour bleeding into some of the adjacent area making the snow green there. Not good.
I recall having previously using another colorizing site (or perhaps it was this one) and uploading the image of "The Rifelman" from the old TV series as he walks down the street in the intro. The colours were really good.
Thanks.
I'm glad you had fun with it.
It was fun running 40+ images through it. I didn't have great results with the color images that were converted to grayscale either.