Julie WebgirlWanna use ai to add color to an old black & white photo?
You might want to rethink that.
You may end up with cereal boxes appearing out of nowhere or items that are in the original pic disappearing...
Perpetuum Mobile@juliewebgirl it depends on what AI you use to restore colors, if you use GenAI tools like multimodal LLM, then yes, it might add things that weren't there (vide DLSS 5). If you design a custom U-net or GAN in pytorch, which is trained on photos converted to B&W, it should do just fine.
I'll try to make this kind of model if I have some free time. Should be a fun experiment to do!
It sounds like you're defending ai...
@juliewebgirl if I make a model myself on data that I own, using GPU that is physically in my own hardware, just to add color to old photos of my family, what's wrong with that?
I'm not trying to defend commercial LLMs here, I'm talking about classical ML
@perpetuum_mobile
Ah, gotcha. I get caught up in the fact that ai (I know it's LLM, I wish there was a quotation marks emoji that means "big hairy quotation marks") is used blindly by the masses or by ai-bros who defend it to the death bcuz I don't even know why, and add to that my deep dislike for B&W things being colorized. I get the artisticness of it and ease (I had a darkroom at one time & developing color was a BITCH), but the example posted showed 3 completely different color...
Ah, gotcha. I get caught up in the fact that ai (I know it's LLM, I wish there was a quotation marks emoji that means "big hairy quotation marks") is used blindly by the masses or by ai-bros who defend it to the death bcuz I don't even know why, and add to that my deep dislike for B&W things being colorized. I get the artisticness of it and ease (I had a darkroom at one time & developing color was a BITCH), but the example posted showed 3 completely different color...
...versions. Grandma had bright pink, bright turquoise and a neutral color shirt on. I personally would want it authentic if it were my own photos. For art sake? Hell yeah, go crazy but actually trying to recreate will never be right IMO and I don't consider it "restoring" color, but altering it. I actually like B&W. :)
@juliewebgirl I tried once building an U-net to add colors to B&W photos, but I was getting really washed out hues. So, being an engineer, I started wondering WHY I'm getting just a little effect, instead of color photos. And I quickly realized why: statistics. If you put 100 red shirts and 100 blue shirts in training, the model will average it out... and output greyish purple. It's all math after all!
Next time I will try to add a secondary GAN network to force the model to choose a color.
Hmm why let it choose? You choose. If you want a red shirt, train it on red shirts only.
Yeah, I may too much of a control freak to leave artistic matters up to a computer. I want it this shade of red, now just do the hard part for me! 🤣
@juliewebgirl if I want to edit one photo and want full creative control I just start the GIMP ;-) and do it manually. It's not that hard really. Just split into layers... Alter colors... Repeat until entire image is to your liking
Yes! Still looks like muddy shit IMO but ok.
So you're talking about changing a whole batch at once ... But why??