Coloring Old photo using DeOldify

Colors are so much powerful at expressing thoughts and emotions. Each color has a story to tell and can bring lots of memory with colors. The first camera used to give a print out in mono-color. Typically the black and white photos represent all the past events and they always remind of past. The Artist is a French movie that won Oscar in 2011 which was black and white as it wanted to portray the plot of 1927 as people subconsciously are dipped into the emotion of that era as colors play a vital role in human’s minds.

I was interested in coloring old images and wanted to see those black and white images to colorful images. But this took lots of hard work and perseverance. In addition, it was all about painstakingly hand painting or masking solid colors in Photoshop. Likewise, we must have proper knowledge about the history, the clothes color they wore, the colors of monuments and so on take into consideration.

coloring old image using Photoshop.This is an old photo of Nepali people who are selling coins.

This is image coloration using AI which is available in MyHeritage site

This was my effort before 2 years, I tried coloring old photos using Photoshop and this took a lot of time. Now, I came to know about a program that uses Deep learning which can change the color of the old black and white image to a colorful one.DeOldify is a program that uses the GAN neural network and does all coloring work. It is not limited to photo as it can color old video footage also.

Here are the result using DeOldify to color old footage

Gorkhali army in procession in Durbar square which is believed be before WW1. Publisher : Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Technische Zusammenarbeit, 1995

An old photo of Bhaktapur Durbar Square

Old pic of Ason street

A car on rainy monsoon

Gurkhas in Tundikhel

Around kathmandu valley. photo by: Hira Kazi

Photo of Durbarmarg ,kathmandu

Boudhanath stupa before 1960

kids flying kites in Boudhanath stupa

swyambhunath stupa in around 1920

kathmandu Durbar square

aerial view of Durbarbar Square open market

kathmandu streets

view of Ghantaghar(left clock tower) from Rani Pokhari in 1919.

View from Dharara where we can see Bhadrikali temple and tundikhel compounds.

Towards Chikamungal from Ombahal in 1970s

These are some of the rendering done Deoldify.In order to do this, you just need a google account. Just choose photo or video you want to colorize in this site then it will lead you to googlecolab . Follow the guideline that is given beforehand in the Colab notebook and its as simple as it.

What’s Good

• It gives almost perfect result for landscape
• it gives color reference for further editing works

What’s Bad

• It doesn’t work for group photos with landscape or artifacts as from above image result we can observe clearly
• It gives retro or old coloring style if we want a new coloring style this program won’t satisfy you.

Retouching With Photoshop:

After I rendered the result , I did little bit retouching the rendered image and this was an easy task which was just using the slider and adjusting curves and sometimes using curves.These are the result.

With little bit tweaking in Photoshop, the result was quiet impressive and more colorful.The use of AI in these type of work increase our workflow and it saves our lots of time.Retouching in Photoshop was all about using color properly .

Even though, its fascinating to see the mono-color transformed into multiple colors. But the old photo loses their aesthetic when they are colorized and it is unjust for the photos as they are supposed to remain what they are, real and organics.