Colorizing Infrared Achromatic Images with AI

[buildbot]

Something I have been wondering about for a bit is if you can get a decent color image from an achromatic back using AI to colorize the photo. Photoshop recently added a colorize neural filter, and there are also some decent approaches on github, which I tried here:

It actually worked pretty well! Considering none of this light was visible to begin with. few more images and a comparison with photoshop here.

This technology will only get better as well, especially with extremely large vision transformers and diffusion based training.

 

[pegelli]

Indeed amazing, only the trees around the buildings at the lower edge still is a bit grey, the rest is very nice, it even produced some fall colours among the green trees

 

[tcdeveau]

That's pretty interesting. As someone crazy enough to shell out for an achromatic back over regular I haven't ever been too interested in colorizing the images but neat to see some tools coming along if one wants to.

 

[JeffK]

There is some fun to be had with Photoshop CHOPs (channel operations) as you push your grayscale image into a multichannel file and manipulate there. You can end up with some very interesting RGB/LAB/CMYK results.

 

[ggibson]

Impressive that the saturation decreases appropriately in the distance with atmospheric haze.

I like the DeOldify results better than PS's also. The results from PS seem overly saturated in places.

 

[drevil]

i have briefly played with the PS neural filter, and in some rare cases the results are usable and in some it lefts out huge chunks of the image in BW

 

[buildbot]

That's pretty interesting. As someone crazy enough to shell out for an achromatic back over regular I haven't ever been too interested in colorizing the images but neat to see some tools coming along if one wants to.

Same, I prefer B/W to color immensely. Ideally at some point colorization is good enough I can sell my IQ260 I keep around for col

Impressive that the saturation decreases appropriately in the distance with atmospheric haze.

I like the DeOldify results better than PS's also. The results from PS seem overly saturated in places.

Indeed! DeOldify must have a good training dataset with some hazy landscape shots, it overall was very plausible.

i have briefly played with the PS neural filter, and in some rare cases the results are usable and in some it lefts out huge chunks of the image in BW

Yeah I was initially just trying this in Photoshop as it was the only tool that worked for 100MP images, but it turns out DeOldify will too given enough memory.