Show HN: I made a new AI colorizer

Thank you so much Emil - I have some old photos B&#x2F;W of my dad who is no longer with us and have wanted to colorize them somehow for years. The results from just dropping the photos on your page - no tweaking or whatnot - are incredible and have me in tears.<p>Amazing work.

Awesome job! This makes me a bit envious. I am hobbyist colorizer [1] who did it the old school way (with tools like Affinity Photo and lot of manual work). I tried de-oldify and other tools but I justified my work thinking how horrible they were but pallette.fm is way too good. Not sure if I would find the motivation to restore old photos anymore. Glad that this was just a small hobby for me and I had just started learning the ropes.<p>But I would be dead scared if I was a professional[2] who did this full-time. Is this what AI taking your job feels like?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shubhamjain.co&#x2F;experiments&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shubhamjain.co&#x2F;experiments&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vubuBrcAwtY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vubuBrcAwtY</a>

I gave it ansel adams photos which it did really well on. Then I tried some famous national geographic photos, like the these: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;photography&#x2F;article&#x2F;meet-grandfather-flash-the-pioneer-of-wildlife-photography" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalgeographic.com&#x2F;photography&#x2F;article&#x2F;meet-...</a><p>still impressed<p>I decided to go really old, so I tried &quot;Valley of the Shadow of Death&quot; from the 1850s where we get some red and blue cannonballs, but that&#x27;s fine.<p>1838 Louis Daguerre photo of paris: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1838.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1838.png</a><p>1906 Kite aerial of san francisco after the earthquake: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1906.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1906.png</a><p>1895 Montparnasse train wreck: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1895.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1895.png</a><p>1920 Wall Street bombing: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1920.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;1920.png</a><p>1920s Park Row skyscrapers: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;parkrow.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;9ol.es&#x2F;parkrow.png</a>

Nice, maybe I can turn the movie The Lighthouse from black and white into a color motion picture. I hear color &quot;movies&quot; as they call &#x27;em are what&#x27;s hot these days.<p>Original: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;9CZ7vk1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;9CZ7vk1.png</a><p>Base Palette: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;iTq5H9W.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;iTq5H9W.jpeg</a>

Very cool.<p>Your results look much better than the washed out AI colorization that I&#x27;ve seen in the past.<p>I think you could charge money for this service.<p>A suggestion for something fun to do &#x2F; marketing tool: recolorize this video frame-by-frame <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw</a><p>Feature request: colorize B&amp;W comic books. I really want to create a full color book of Calvin &amp; Hobbes comics. (Not for publication)

I ran a test with a photo I took if people are curious. It does a great job for guessing, but of course there is room for improvement.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;Y9dH4GxW&#x2F;palette-fm-test.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;Y9dH4GxW&#x2F;palette-fm-test.jpg</a>

Unfortunately, this has the common bias[1] with IA coloring of making old stuff look dull, reinforcing the Hollywood cliché[2]. The past was actually often very colorful.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.lacontrevoie.fr&#x2F;gwenckatz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381652071695351810#m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.lacontrevoie.fr&#x2F;gwenckatz&#x2F;status&#x2F;138165207169...</a><p>[2]: see this video by a movie props maker about why Hollywood movies make old things look the way they do in movie <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mF1VFlCnLQ4?t=434" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mF1VFlCnLQ4?t=434</a>

Nice UI, and the approach works quite well (occasional wrong choice of palette compared to ground truth). It’s kind of fun to turn my photos into B&#x2F;W and run through the model to try and guess the output.<p>Do you have a privacy policy for the uploaded photos? I’m not keen on uploading anything important without knowing how it’s stored or will be used in the future.

I was actually testing Photoshop&#x27;s new colorizing filter this week, so this is timely. My first impression of Palette in comparison is that it does a comparably good job of colorizing. Sometimes Photoshop does better, sometimes Palette -- usually the skin tones is the hardest part, and one does a noticeably better job than the other.<p>The natural language modifications available in Palette (&quot;his shirt is light blue&quot;) are super useful. Well done.

I tried it on the photo linked below and it makes the string instruments look like they&#x27;re made of brass. Not trying to bash it since I thought it was pretty impressive overall, but I&#x27;m curious about what leads to this type of failure.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Jazzing_orchestra_1921.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Jazzing_orchestra_19...</a>

I&#x27;ve never posted here before but this demands a sincere &quot;thank you&quot;.<p>I just colorised some family photos from the 1930s to the 80s and the results are heartwarming.<p>Thank you for making this and making it free and, most importantly, easy to use.

Can I paint some colors as a starting point (like img2img) and let it finish the rest?<p>What about a conversation, like, &quot;the dress isn&#x27;t blue, it should be orange&quot;, doing on top of previous prompt?

Wow, any way to run this locally?<p>I love this technology but it would feel kinda terrible to upload a whole bunch of stuff to your site and exploit your generosity.

Nice. Combine with restoration like this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MachineLearning&#x2F;comments&#x2F;j01y9u&#x2F;d_bringing_old_photos_back_to_life_microsofts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MachineLearning&#x2F;comments&#x2F;j01y9u&#x2F;d_b...</a> would bring life to many old photos.

Looks great and works particularly well.<p>A couple of bug reports: - Clicking on the P logo on the home page takes me to a page with what looks to be an example, but none of the filters ever load. - Navigating directly to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;palette.fm&#x2F;color&#x2F;filters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;palette.fm&#x2F;color&#x2F;filters</a> returns a 500.

It&#x27;s funny to let it operate on a pile of random Lego blocks of different colours. Funny how it sometimes uses a completely different colour. In some other cases it guesses it completely right. Sometimes you also see a from one color to another color gradient, while the real thing has one color with a shadow gradient. How large is your trainingsset?

Any chance you would license the model for us to use with pixlr.com?

Wow I put a few b+w photos, initially shot in colour so I can compare how it did, and it more or less nailed it—great work. They were shot on a iphone, so I wonder if newer digitally-shot photos have more data for the app to parse, or if it&#x27;s generally easier compared to film (and whether it uses any EXIF data)

Just a quick heads up, when I ran the file and then opened the result in irfanview, I get a warning that the file is a JPG file with an incorrect extension.<p>You may want to check your encoding settings to make sure everything gels together.<p>Otherwise, great job! This is pretty nice stuff and way better than I could do on my own!

(Genuine) question, and no snark intended: why do so many people want to change history?<p>Black and white photos are - for many of us - part of our shared historical record. Is there really a need to improve (=change) them? Can&#x27;t we appreciate them exactly as they are, without modifications?

This works amazingly well, just putting in some of my favorite black and white scenes from movies... wow! Now I need some kind of tool that can do this on every frame of a black and white movie. I cannot wait to be able to watch some old classics fully colorized.

Thanks, this is awesome. Colorized a few last images of my WWII grandfather who died in this war. One observation: on download the MIME type seems to by PNG format, but the binary file arriving is actually a (lossy compressed) JPEG. But anyhow! Great work!!

I had some black and white photos of my passed-away tuxedo cat, fully expecting this to produce a terrible result, but instead I was blown away by accurate and subtle colors added. Pinkish nose, ears, green eyes all came out of the photo.

Wow! I am impressed. I uploaded a WWII photo of airmen posing in front of their plane and got an amazing result. I’m not certain if WWII era life vests were bright yellow, that seems out of place, but it’s a good guess if not.

Thank you for providing pre-set examples on your site. That&#x27;s one of the major barriers on these types of tools to &quot;test&quot; especially when you&#x27;re not sure where&#x2F;how&#x2F;if the images are public.

I immediately was limiting this to think it would just colorize B&amp;W images, but you can use this on images with colour to use natural language to modify the colours of an existing image too!

Open Source? Would love to see how this works and also the website.

Today I was thinking of some sort of NN trained for colorizing photos, and then I get here and there&#x27;s an AI right there...<p>This tool works really well. The text prompt helps, too. The suggested colors leak to surrounding objects (I forced a red skirt on a traditional costume I knew was probably red), but it looks really good.<p>Did you decolorize pictures originally in color in order to train the model?

The ease of use,speed and accuracy are impressive. I tried doing a colorization by hand a few years ago using photoshop. It took a long time and it was not as good.<p>Over the years, I&#x27;ve read that a products that&#x27;s 10x better will be a game changer. I think you have, at least, a 10x better product. Congratulations!<p>I&#x27;ll be using your service for my B&#x2F;W prints. Great job!

This is great. I&#x27;d also love to have the option to manually draw guiding colors over parts of the image, for even more control.

All I can say is: very very nice (Testing on some 3d renders and some bw photos). p.s. Is output image width limited to 1920px?

I&#x27;ve tried a few of my own black and white photos and the description of each starts with &quot;a stock photo of a...&quot; Is this a comment on my style of photography or is this always added for the base palette prompt? (The colorized images have been very impressive.)

Excellent work - enjoyed the rick roll. Would you mind sharing how you&#x27;ve done the GPU deployment?

Incredible service. Just annoyed once I show it to my folks I&#x27;ll be dragged into multi hour tutorial session on how to scan &#x2F; upload old albums. Also curious which &quot;filter&quot; they feel will most reflect the subjective reality of the past.

Heh, a lot of the results are more visually appealing than the real landscape I shot in B&amp;W.

I love the way it finds features and labels the picture. It thinks I am a meteorologist!

This is magic… How the heck does it know that the walls of my home gym is light green?!?<p>Impressive!

Quite an incredible compilation of photos on your reddit page, thanks for sharing.

I thought from the title it was some JavaScript to auto-colorize essentially any programming language and was excited, because that stuff is annoying to implement for any new programming language out there.<p>Still cool though.

This is absolutely mind-blowing to me, is this using an API of any sort? I&#x27;d love to be able to take something like my City&#x27;s archive of Black &amp; White images and colorize them.

Wow, it’s awesome! What technologies does it use?<p>I’ve used to restore the only photo my wife has of her father who died when she was 3yo. She almost cried seeing the colori ed photo, thank you

It would be nice if you could put hex colors in the prompts. E.g. instead of saying &quot;man wearing blue shirt&quot;, you could say &quot;man wearing #0010e4 shirt&quot;.

Amazing. Colorized a rare picture of my grandfather. Thanks!!!

Colorizing b&#x2F;w photos is one thing; these are limited representation of colorful reality.<p>Now let&#x27;s colorize b&#x2F;w works of Albrecht Dürer, or Francisco Goya.

I tried one of my recent B&amp;W film images. It basically recreated the original scene (a graffitied building). Nice!

Tried a few old family photos and it&#x27;s done a good job - mostly better than the other ones I&#x27;ve tried. Excellent work.

This is incredibly well done! Congrats. It’s such a solid layer on top of recent developments and offers instant value.<p>Wish you much success!!

I tried some of my old university photos. Totally amazing. Thank you so much for a wonderful work

I haven&#x27;t tried any other colorizer tools but this one works very well for me. Thank you.

that&#x27;s incredible. congratulations on the great work and thanks for sharing with us.

How are the prompts&#x2F;captions generated? Also I love that you&#x27;re using Svelte!

This is a top tier side project.

Can you summarize the approach you took on creating the model? Really curious!

This is a really impressive colorizer. Don&#x27;t feel guilty monetizing.

I laughed out loud reading your ABOUT page. Thank you!

First time getting rick rolled in plain text :)

This is wonderful. Works really well. Thank you!

Is there a way I could contact you directly?

How does it work? Do you write scientific papers?

This is quite amazing, and useful. Great work.

How does this differ from deoldify?

tested on a few pics. excellent colorization. pls provide patreon etc link so the site stays up! thxxx

very cool. just coloured some old family tree pics and they look great. thanks.

Amazing work congratulations!

Hi Emil, thank you for this!

This blew my mind. Amazing.

Wow.