Comment on Breathtaking colorized video from 1896 of around the world
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 6 months agoI think you’re right to be wary of it. It’s like AI colorization of photos. They tend to be much more desaturated than ones done by professionals. Great colorists take the time to research materials and fashions and make informed guesses about how things should look. When something automated by AI it can be much more inaccurate since no research was done.
I would imagine the same pitfalls could happen with a video like this. It’s cool to see the results, but I agree it shouldn’t be presented as anything more than an artistic re-interpretation.
Lupus108@feddit.de 6 months ago
Yeah I once saw a “colorization” done by AI from a photo from the early 1900s or something, it was a photo from a house and some people in front of it, Russia or Ukraine somewhere.
The thing is that the photo that was used was in fact a color photo that they turned black and white and then gave it to the AI. The AI used very muted colors, a little beige a little dark green - colors you would expect from a photo of that time and region. In the original you could see, that the colors where actually very bright and plentiful, the house was a bright yellow not beige, the green fence was not dark green but bright green, the accents on the house were not brown but red. The people in the AI colorized picture had black, white, dark blue clothes, a man had a brown hat, in the original they wore blue dresses, yellow blouses, the hat was red and so on.
Of course you can extrapolate some things but the original photo was so colorful, these people clearly painted the house bright on purpose and they wore very bright clothes but the re-colorization was so much less colorful and it gave a wrong impression of the reality what was photographed. Of course the old film wasn’t perfect and the colors maybe were also a little off - but it showed how many different colors were present in the original.