COLORIZE BW PHOTO SOFTWARE

Smothers’s workflow includes Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Mocha Pro.

I’ve timed projects and using motion tracking, I work almost 10 times faster than painting frame by frame (UMU). Now for efficiency, I use motion tracking and rotoscoping to animate color on top of the black and white footage.

Before The Munsters opening, I had colorized images and I knew there were more efficient methods for video, but I figured doing at least one frame-by-frame project would be good for me. My process is constantly evolving with the goal to increase speed and improve quality. If you do, you’ll see that the magic is, in actuality, a painstaking frame-by-frame process that pulls colors out one by one - by hand. If you’re not a fan of a magician revealing his tricks, it’d be best to not watch the video above. In fact, it was pretty terrible and even today, colorizations are typically flat with little shading and color variation” (interview with Universal Monsters Universe).Īs you can see in the colorized intro to The Addams Family above, Smothers’s digital colorization has not only brought out the black-and-white footage’s colors, it has also given the footage dynamic contrast that seems to pop back to life. Smothers, an avid fan of retro pop culture, is a leader of the digital colorization movement. He pushes for improvements in the quality and efficiency of colorization through new and improved digital techniques and innovation. Meet Zach Smothers - or more importantly, meet his work at POP COLORTURE. For those nostalgic to bring those memories back to life, the art of colorization has become their greatest hope - championed by an up-and-coming wave of digital artists. Yet, there remain artifacts of a simpler time, a time of grayscale and celluloid, which we encounter in classic cinema and on late-night TV. Now, in the digital age, it’s easy to take how far we have come for granted. Industry professionals recorded and broadcast information in monochrome, which carried only variations in the tones and contrasts between light and dark areas.Īs advances in technology made color a necessity, black and white television and films became relics of the past.

The early days of both television and film were only black and white. If you decide to give it a go, let us know what you think.Get a glimpse behind the curtain and learn about the magic art of colorizing old B&W footage with the digital color artist at POP COLORTURE. But if you’re up for testing the accuracy with color photos you converted to black and white, the app is available on GitHub for download. At least you can’t be sure if you colorize an image that was initially created in black and white. And while it gives much better results than the previous one, it still doesn’t mean they are completely accurate. When you add the colored dots, the final result gets much better.Įven though this app is not fully automatic, it still saves you a lot of time (and learning) for colorizing the images manually in Photoshop. But correcting the color looks easy and the color changes in real time so you can immediately see the result.

COLORIZE BW PHOTO SOFTWARE

And when you do it, the software will improve colorization based on your cues.Īccording to the demo, the initial suggestion from the software still doesn’t get quite accurate at times. You have the option of putting colored dots anywhere on the image with the shade you think is appropriate. After this, you can add the color markers and improve the colorization further. When you insert a black and white image, the app will first do the colorization automatically with the color palette it suggests. This latest version needs some assistance from the user to produce the best results. Although it would sometimes make great-looking colorization, it was often inaccurate.

Colorize bw photo