The Wonders of Adobe Photoshop’s “Colorize” Neural Filter
Like most people, I have a box of old black and white (or sepia) photographs under the bed. I dig them out from time to time and enjoy looking through them, but I sometimes feel that the monochromatic image puts a barrier between me and my long gone relatives. We’re not used to seeing people in black and white photos anymore, and it makes them seem very distant, and not really a part of me.
A couple of years ago, I read that Adobe was experimenting with what it called “filters” for Photoshop, essentially the use of artificial intelligence to “improve” images, and one of these was designed to recolour old black and white photos. I suppose I was sceptical, as some of the efforts I’d seen from other companies (no names) were mediochre at best and some of the early “sky replacement” improvements were pretty dire. My expectations weren’t particularly high!
I didn’t think much more about it until a couple of weeks ago, when we were working on an “inspiring women” set of puzzles for International Women’s Day – (you can read more about it here and see the range here). The women we chose were largely from the monochrome era, but I found one image of Marie Curie in her laboratory (see here) that had been hand coloured. I thought it really brought the image to life, and it got me wondering if there were any more hand-coloured, public domain images available we could use.
Short answer, no, but I remembered Adobe’s post, and fired up Photoshop. First problem – there wasn’t a single clue where to find it in the myriad of menus! After googling “colourise” (I’m Scottish) then trying “colorize” (Adobe isn’t Scottish), I managed to find it under “neural filters”. I downloaded it and gave it a go on this wonderful portrait of the Suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst.
I really love this photograph, even in its black and white incarnation, but I thought nothing venured … and this was the result.
This is the image straight from Photoshop, no retouching or other repairs and I think the effect is pretty amazing! To be honest, I wondered if people might think that this was a still from a film, rather than an image from 1918!
The only thing not quite right for me was the colour of her skirt on her left side, but that was relatively easy to sort using the tools which are part of the Colorize filter (essentially using the colour picker tool to import blue from the front of the skirt to replace the brown).
For the final version that we put on the puzzle, I did some judicious cropping to remove the photographer’s cataloguing, used the spot healer brush to remove a few white spots, and that was about it. With the addition of Ms Pankhurst’s memorable quotation, this is the final puzzle.
