Some Google Photos users must have been waiting for a long time for a feature that the company announced almost four years ago and has still not implemented: automatic coloring of black and white images. That doesn’t mean, however, that people aren’t still working on it, as evidenced by some example images that are said to have been processed with this function some time ago.
Image processing is probably one of the most difficult areas for developers because today it feels like nothing works without artificial intelligence. However, this does not apply to image manipulation or the polishing of the last detail pixels, but above all when non-existent information has to be created. Google Photos presented such a feature a few months ago but has yet to provide another.
2/ Here’s a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn’t wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg
— David Lieb (@dflieb) May 6, 2019
Eliminating distracting objects is one area in which the unphotographed areas should be brought forward from the background. This can only be solved by sophisticated pattern completion with extensive AI experience. Details are both practically and theoretically impossible because of what is not there. Surely you can perfectly reconstruct a heavily obscured picture of the Eiffel Tower – because there are millions and millions of photos of the structure. But that is the exception and normally something that has not been photographed can no longer be reconstructed.
With automatic coloring, which we presented to you just a few days ago, things are a bit different. True, the information about colors in black and white images is also absent, but one encounters quite different difficulties, which, in my opinion, are somewhat easier to deal with. But I’m not at all involved in the matter, so I don’t allow myself to judge.
The Google Photos team has been working on this feature for a number of years, and back in 2019, it was included in a leaked version of Google Photos as a beta. It never saw the light of day in the user world, but still managed to test the feature back then. And to show the possibilities, the testers made it quite simple: a color photo. A grayscale version of that photo and then run it through Google Photos to compare the result with the original image. Take a look at the brief gallery below.
There are big differences between the original and the Google Photos image, but that’s to be expected. However, if you only saw the picture on the right and didn’t even know the picture on the left, you would certainly be satisfied at first glance. It looks realistic in my opinion, it’s neither too trendy nor pastel. Images come out that are easy to look at and exude greater realism than the B&W version. Of course, one can wonder if the water under the big suspension bridge can really appear red in the middle of the day without a sunset. But better read than dark gray.
The results are not perfect, as Google’s product manager writes in the tweet above. But they don’t have to be that at all, because it’s much more about increased realism and that you can delve deeper into the situation at the time. It’s not a pretty subject but just think of the well-known colorized original films and pictures from the First World War. A terrible time, but digitally colored, they touched us (or just me?) much more than black and white images. And that’s what it’s all about. So I can hardly understand why Google Photos has been holding back this feature for so long or maybe even stopped developing it. Still, I’m confident that one day something will come of it.