Convert old b/w photos to colour?

[David]

I understand Ancestry.com provide a program to subscribers that converts old family b/w photos to colour. I have PSP 2020 Ultimate and I wonder if it has the same ability to convert old b/w photos to colour? I don't mean using the colour replacement, saturation or Hue tools, I am looking for a way to convert the b/w photo to colour automatically does anyone know if PSP can achieve this or do I have to use another specific program?
David

[Kathy_9]

There is no one step/push button approach to colorizing in PSP.

This will explain how to colorize in PSP.

https://learn.corel.com/tutorials/color ... te-photos/

[David]

Thank for the speedy reply Kathy. It seems that colouring b/w photos with PSP is really by artistic license in that you choose your own colours as opposed to discovering / revealing what the original colours were. I have an old photo of my mother taken in 1947 and I was hoping to discover the original colour of her dress and the flowers that she is standing next to. Maybe there isn't a program that will accomplish this but thanks for the link explaining the PSP method
David

[fred8615]

There is a website that will do what you're looking for, for free. Try this https://www.fotor.com/features/colorize-photo/

[LeviFiction]

I want to tamper your expectations there. There is no "discovering" what the original colors were. ML/AI use guestimations based on training data. Color information doesn't exist in old B&W photos. All they have are tones and it guesses the colors based what they "expect" certain colors would look like based on what it's told might be the most common colors and some of that training is based on the artistic license of manually colorizing old photos by professionals. It can guess a lot of things very well, but they aren't guaranteed to be exact or even close. And different models, trained on different data, could come up with different colors for the dress. So you're just moving from guessing yourself, to a computer doing the guessing for you.

Not saying don't use it or it's pointless, it's still very impressive and nice to have. Just understand that it's inventing colors (hue and saturation) out of nothing more than expectations and lightness/brightness values, it's not revealing the truth. If it colors a tree green it's not because it knows the tree was green, but because it's commonly darker in tone and it looks like a tree. The trees could have been brown that year and the AI won't know that. Or a filter could have been over the lens distorting colors for B&W photos and the guess won't be able to take that into account. The webpage for https://palette.fm/ shows this pretty well in its demonstration images, it includes an option to play with the palette of the result.

I do recommend a service like Ancestry or Photshop's Neural filters as they are made to do a decent job by experts for that express purpose.

[David]

Fred, many thanks for that link. I discovered Image2go earlier which offered free conversion and the result was quite impressive. I just tried Fotor and it definitely is better but to d/l the image I have to sign up so I may do so later.

Levi, thanks for your advice, I accept and understand your reasoning. Interestingly both converted images in image2go and Fotor have used the same colour for her dress but Fotor has much more vibrant colours for the green flowers she is standing next to. I have to admit to being impressed with both results and the speed at which the photo is converted. I do have Photoshop but I could never come to terms with it, died in the wool Paint Shop Pro since v4 and in any case my version of Photoshop but it is an older version and doesn't have the Neural Filter option. I will check out Palette.

[Jean-Luc]

See also here :
https://hotpot.ai/colorize-picture

[winlion]

You can convert old photos into vibrant, colorful images or restoring aged photographs is a straightforward and rewarding process with the Remini AI Enhancer app and other AI-based photo enhancement applications.