colourising b/w photos with AI

[ge_rik]

I've been playing around with getting ChatGPT to colourise some Southwold Railway photos.

Eg

swatwenhaston-1.jpg (455.75 KiB) Viewed 136 times

file_00000000ab2481f4a33d85101da737a5.png (2.7 MiB) Viewed 136 times

Rik

[ge_rik]

I had to tell it that the loco should be GER blue

file_0000000033f481f4a54193b5ba8d4eb6.png (2.72 MiB) Viewed 134 times

And then tell it to remove the GER lettering

file_000000006b1881f4a51cdb3c13cff450.png (2.66 MiB) Viewed 134 times

Interesting it's also removed the caption from the original postcard


Rik

[ge_rik]

file_000000005f4082469e63f7a9c3dd233e.png (2.7 MiB) Viewed 127 times

I wanted to change the colour of the loco in the shed but I've now exceeded my daily limit for the freebie processing

Rik

[philipy]

Looks good Rik. I did some playing with colourising back when I built the Chingford contractors loco, it wasn't bad but I think things have moved on since then. I actually used the colourising feature of "Find My Past" for that, which was the only easily available one at the time.

I notice on your first set of pictures that it has actually coloured the "green" spectacle in blue, which is of course correct but it could easily have missed that one!

[drewzero1]

Looks good Rik, and that charming blue engine sure does look familiar in color

I have occasionally seen anachronisms in AI-colorized works, probably due to modern biases in the training data. Stuff like coloring pants as blue jeans before they were commonly available. Just something to watch out for!

[ge_rik]

I notice on your first set of pictures that it has actually coloured the "green" spectacle in blue, which is of course correct but it could easily have missed that one!

Yes, I spotted that.

But I've also just noticed that the spectacle on the far side of the signal ought to be showing green to the train. Clearly, some maintenance is needed. I must have looked at his picture dozens of times and never spotted it.

Rik

[ge_rik]

It let me have another go this morning so I asked it to colour the loco in the shed. Interesting result.

file_00000000251081f480388e37c67d4787.png (2.71 MiB) Viewed 53 times

However, when I asked it to colour the face of the driver, it told me I'd reached my limit again and will have to wait five hours.

Rik

[philipy]

However, when I asked it to colour the face of the driver, it told me I'd reached my limit again and will have to wait five hours.

I had that problem with Google Gemini when we first got involved with creating figures with Gemini and Meshy. I think its something to do with how they work, so if you ask it a question, or to do something, on a long or complicated thread, it has to reconstruct the entire sequence from the beginning to add to it. It may help, once you get back in, to save that picture, then start a new chat and load the picture back in and simply ask it to colourise the drivers face. No guarantees but doing that has helped me in the past.