Turn your B&W film photos into colour!

FishyFish

FishyFish

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Nige
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I read this article on 35mmc earlier about a guy who processed some Kodachrome as B&W and then converted them to colour using Photoshop's Colorize neural filter:

www.35mmc.com

Finding Kodachrome and Bringing Back Color (the Digital Way)- By Zheng Li

Some of us know Kodachrome from the iconic Afghan Girl photo by National Geographic's Steve McCurry. Some of us might even have watched the 2017 movie of the same name, about an estranged son trying to develop the last few rolls of exposed Kodachrome from his late father. Some of us, lucky...
www.35mmc.com www.35mmc.com

For fun, I decided to try it out on a few of my B&W scans to see how they would look. They're actually quite nice in an artificial way. Some pictures work better than others, and you often end up with odd splashes of colour where the filter gets it wrong, or areas of grey where it doesn't add any colour at all, but these three are not too bad.

1
Olympus OM-2n on Ilford HP5+

Beyond the tall grass copy by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

2
Holga 120N on Fomapan 100

The house by the park copy by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr

3
Olympus XA3 on Kodak Tri-X

Castle and memorial copy by fishyfish_arcade, on Flickr
 
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Different I’ll give it that.

The thing is that no matter how much manipulation is done with modern tech, it can never duplicate exactly the original film result .

Close resemblance perhaps but always going to appear ‘cloned’ ( for want of a better expression )

Nonetheless a good effort on your part Nige ;)
 
I've seen worse "colourised" (or should it be "colorized"? :P) photos from back in the day!
 
Those have come out well.

The MyHeritage family history site has a similar facility for colouring old black and white photos. I've used it a bit and it does quite a good job on people and vegetation but struggles with objects like cars, they end up looking like they have been painted with these fancy modern car paints that change colour depending on the angle of view.
 
Asha said:
Different I’ll give it that.

The thing is that no matter how much manipulation is done with modern tech, it can never duplicate exactly the original film result .

Close resemblance perhaps but always going to appear ‘cloned’ ( for want of a better expression )

Nonetheless a good effort on your part Nige ;)
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Oh, I agree, they are unlikely to look like native colour photos, at least not without a lot of work. The three I posted here were the best of the ones I tried - some of the others looked awful - but I didn't tweak any of them with the presets or manual colour sliders, which might have improved things further.

Its a fun thing to play around with but I cant see myself ever using it puposely because I wish I'd shot colour instead of B&W or something.
Kevin Allan said:
I tried a few examples but couldn't get any where the filter has worked as well as it did for FishyFish. As you can see below it seems to struggle to know where to apply the different colours.

View attachment 352486
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Yeah, I got several that looked like that. One looked half-finished with the vast majority of the picture still black and white.
 
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FishyFish said:
I think you've solved the problem of the rising price of colour film Peter. :)
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Not so sure about that Nige, but I'll certainly be sending it off to DSCL for a decent sized print when I get a suitable offer from them. (y)
 
These are very good, didn’t someone produce some colour shots by shooting black and white film with red, blue and green filters a few years back?
 
I expect someone has done it more recently, but James Clerk Maxwell produced the world's first colour photo (of a piece of tartan cloth) back in the 1860s using this method.

More recently (!) it was used to make archival negatives of colour.
 
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Just as another historical aside (I just remembered it), you might want to look up the Lippman process. That is factual and verifiable.

Much less so (probably) is an interesting story recounted by Victor Blackman in AP in the 1960s. He met a chap who claimed that the different wavelengths of light affected the silver halides in black and white film differently, and that it was possible to produce a full colour image from a black and white negative. Victor was skeptical, but had the chap demonstrate with a negative he supplied. The interesting thing was that the resulting print showed a yellow cast in the foreground. There was actually such a cast in the scene caused by a surface not in the field of view which only VB knew about. Can't recall who the chap was (or even if a name was given), and, like VB it seems too good to be true to me. However...
 
This website also does a pretty good job though you can only upload smaller sizes.
imagecolorizer.com

Colorize | Colorize Black & White Old Photos Online Free

Colorize old photos online with ImageColorizer, the best AI photo colorizer tool. Add vivid, lifelike colors to your black-and-white photos instantly. No sign-up required.
imagecolorizer.com imagecolorizer.com
It is comparable to the PS filter in most cases.
They both do well identifying sky/trees/grass and skin tone ( if they find a face) but sometimes struggle on things such as vehicles, and sometimes clothing is just a pointless smudge
 
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