How to colorize a B&W photo?

[Lee]

Hi -

Anyone know either of the following? -

1. How to colorize a B&W photo in Corel Photo-Paint, Version 7.0?

2. How to colorize a B&W photo in any decent, free or very inexpensive colorizing software program that's simple to use, such that it may even do it automatically for the user with very few, simple steps or processes?

For now, I want to colorize just 1 particular B&W photo, the following 1981 headshot of actress Christine Lahti from the Richard Dreyfuss drama movie "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" -

https://i.postimg.cc/mDd0vr1N/Lahti-Christine-34.jpg

Is it even possible to somehow get a kind someone to colorize just this 1 particular photo for me, either for free or just a very small fee? So far I've already tried several "highly-recommended" free software programs on the 'Net, but have been frustrated so far because it seems that all of them are either too complicated to use (for advanced users rather than beginners) or all they seem to do is tint the photo slightly in a hue that's almost the same as either her facial skin or her hair color. I don't know what color her lipstick/lips are supposed to be, but at least I know that her eyes are supposed to be either hazel or brown.

Any help whatsoever would be very much appreciated - THANKS!

[Paul]

I've seen two university-type projects for colorizing.

One program was so crude, it required the operator to pick "key points"
and select colors for the key points. Which, as it turns out, is a lot
of work.

The second (also using neural networks), could assign colors itself,
based on training on a large number of photos.

The normal test for these tools is "feathered parrot in rain forest",
and it will select purple or green for the parrot, it gets the green
leaves mostly correct.

But both of them suffer from the same problem. Namely, they cannot
"paint within the lines". There tends to be a bit of "overspray
around the edges" of objects.

This makes the results tantalizingly close, but "not right". It's
just not production grade workmanship. And if you had to fix
the issues by hand, why... you might as well colorize it by hand.

sudo apt install python3-pip

pip install autocolorize

sudo apt install caffe-cpu # not in Ubuntu 2204, but still in Ubuntu 2004.
# The caffe-cuda appears to be out of support,
# which is not a deal-breaker unless you are
# training neural-network designs. This is why it
# takes four minutes - it's CPU based.

/home/bullwinkle/.local/bin/autocolorize -d cpu BW.jpg -o CLR.jpg
"Downloading weights file" [maybe 500MB worth][700KB/sec][cached for next time]

It doesn't use multiple CPU cores, which is... odd.
Start time 11:40AM. RAM usage 17.7GB so far (on a 64GB machine). Finish at 11:44AM.
Considering the amount of time this is taking, she'll have green lipstick.

And that was an amazingly prescient guess on my part,
as the program did NOT colorize the image and just
turned the entire image a tint of green. Bad monkey! Bad!

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/rpKhmQCq/test-and-fix-attempt.jpg

The left image is the original.
The middle image is the colorization output.
The right hand image, is rotating the color dials in GIMP
and "doing the best you can" sorta.

Oh well.

Paul

[Lee]

THANKS very much, Paul. Someone on another forum kindly did the following for me, which seems to be much better than anything I could ever do, except for the eye color being incorrect, as I did mention before that Christine's eyes are supposed to be either hazel or brown -

https://i.postimg.cc/05B6pwn9/Lahti-Christine-34d.jpg

So now all I have to do is just correct the eye color to brown or hazel, but I could very well screw it up badly & make it even worse. If anyone out there would be kind enough to be willing to give it a shot, it would be tremendously appreciated, but if not, then I'm still very thankful/grateful already anyway for the efforts. THANKS again!

[Paul]

There's something about the skin tone that isn't
right there. It almost looks like in addition to
running a colorize, they may have touched up the
odd spot. It's always possible for a commercial
filter to have a multitude of approaches in the
one filter (like maybe a Photoshop filter) and
end up with such a result.

I don't know anything about layers and paths in
photo editors, so I don't think I can modify the
image to any satisfactory result. You can kinda
bucket fill patches of the image, but that doesn't
look absolutely the best either.

You really have to follow the tool tutorials, to
operate the tool properly for the job you have
in mind.

My level of skill with photo editors is "crop n' scale"
and that's about it. I couldn't color correct something
if my life depended on it.

Paul

[Lee]

On Thursday, June 23, 2022 at 11:15:49 AM UTC-4, Paul wrote:

> My level of skill with photo editors is "crop n' scale"
> and that's about it. I couldn't color correct something
> if my life depended on it.

That's OK. I very much appreciate your efforts - thanks again.