Colorize-it.com for colorizing black and white images

- I mostly shoot black and white images, I'm not particularly opposed to color, it's just how I visualize things, so it's a little odd to me that I'm going to pitch to you now what I'm about to pitch to you, which is a website that will colorize images for you. You can hand it a black and white photo, it'll hand you back a color photo. It's pretty amazing. There's no controls, it's free, it just works. That said, the images that you're going to get back are going to look like old, worn color photos, maybe old, worn black and white photos that were hand tinted, it's that kind of look.

What I think it's really great for though is old family photos. Take a look at this. I've got this black and white image here. This actually has some tint to it, this is a scan of an old print, so it's a bit yellowed. I'm going to take it over here to colorize-it.com, that's colorize dash it .com, and I just point it to my image here. If these images are already up on the web, you can give it a URL, and it'll go fetch it from there. It does a little processing, and then shows me this interface, where I can see a before and after. So, here's my original image, here's the colorized version.

I think it's done a really impressive job with this particular image. It even chose a color here. The skin tones are all very nice. It doesn't look like a new color image, it does look like an old hand tinted photo, but that's actually a nice look. For an old photo, it actually makes it a little clearer, there's a little more depth to it. Let's take a look at some others. It's not perfect, it will make mistakes, and I'll show you a couple of those.

This one, it did a very good job of though. It's identified the grass as grass, it's chosen some colors for the clothing here. You can see that it put a little splash of yellow here on this building back here, it didn't color it completely, but that ended up looking kind of authentic. In here, there's some color missing, those just look like bleached out or overexposed areas. So again, it's not restoring perfect color, but it is giving me what looks like an old colorized, or old faded color image, and it's a nice way of really breathing some life into these old, low quality, kind of beat up old images.

I think this one is a particularly good example of, here's the before, and I like this image in black and white, but I can understand it a lot more with just these little bits of color that it's put in. In the process of colorizing it, it stripped out that uniform color tone that was coloring everything, that was making the image a little muddy. So, this is a case where it's really made for an image that's much more clear. Grab another one.

Again, it does a pretty good job identifying grass and trees. There's some weird color shift here from green to yellow, but again I would say, to my eye, that looks like a faded color photograph. I have found a few images where it got the green completely wrong, and gave me a yellow lawn. So, it doesn't always get things right. I can show you here an example of a full on fail. This image, it tried to colorize the clothing here, and it's like it couldn't make up its mind.

It didn't really commit to putting blue all over this dress, or yellow all over this shirt. At first, I thought, "Oh, it's having trouble "with areas that are overexposed," but it's not. Some of these bright areas, look, it threw some blue in here, that doesn't make sense. Some of these really bright areas have color on them. So, there are times where it does just blow it, but most of the time I'm finding it does a very good job. Here's another failure. This one's not quite as bad. It's a little bit weird, the grass isn't green, but there's a very blue sky.

It put some green up here, the roof is a little bit green. This one doesn't really work. What I've been finding that's interesting are, there are still times where it can get things wrong, but in a way that actually still improves the image somehow. So, here's a before, and here's and after. It hasn't done a real dramatic coloring, but again, in its process of coloring, it's cleaned up the image in some ways that make it a little bit easier to read. Now, I could take this image out to a straight black and white, and do some tonal adjustments, and get it more clear, but this approach works also, and it's a one-button thing, it doesn't take any work on my part.

Again, the upside to this is it's free. The downside is you are not getting back the full pixel count of your images. You're probably not going to get enough pixel data back to do a very large print, but for posting on social media, for posting on websites, it's going to be plenty. Simple download button here to get the colorized image. This is colorize-it.com. When you get here, up at the top, you're going to see this area on pricing. That's not actually the pricing for the photos, that's the pricing to use this algorithm, and the other algorithms for sale by this company, called Algorithmia.

So, all of this stuff up here about pricing is about getting access to the underlying image. So, if you've got some old family photos, this is a great way to play with them, and kind of get a different take on them. If you throw new black and white photos in, you're going to find out they come out looking like old family photos, you get that same kind of old timey tinted color treatment. I personally don't, if I've shot an image nowadays in black and white, it's because I want it in black and white. So, I don't find it that useful for that, but for color rising these old family images, Colorize-It is very cool.