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Thursday, 31 March 2016
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Photoshop of the Future May Be Able to Auto-Colorize a B&W Photo
Colorizing old black-and-white photos with Photoshop has been a popular subject on the Internet over the past few years, as skilled retouchers use their time and skills to offer a new view of vintage images. In the future, though, software may be able colorize B&W photos with the click of a button.
Automatically colorizing black-and-white photos is a problem that computer science researchers are hard at work on. In a new paper titled “Colorful Image Colorization,” UC Berkeley computer vision PhD student Richard Zhang and his team share how they’re using a “convolutional neural network” to create automatic colorizations that can often fool humans.
Their new system is full automatic — other past systems have required a great deal of use input — and is trained on over 1 million color photos. Compared to previous systems, this new one creates colorized photos that are more vibrant and realistic.
To test the system they created, the scientists found human test subjects and showed them two versions of photos — one would be the real color photo, and the other would be one that artificially colorized by the software. The humans were asked to figure out which was which.
20% of the photo pairs actually fooled the humans, meaning the colorized versions were guessed as the real color photos — this “fool rate” is much higher than prior research in this area.
Here are some sample photos that were automatically colorized by the system. This first set contains photos by renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams (left is the original Adams shot, and right is the colorized one):
Here’s another before-and-after using photos by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson:
While the results aren’t perfect, it’s a big step in the right direction. Researchers are working on making the results indistinguishable from actual color photos.
If you’d like to read into the technical details of this research, you can do so on the website and in the full paper. Demo code has also been released on GitHub if you’d like to run it yourself.
Perhaps one day we’ll find an Auto-Colorize feature built into Photoshop that turns a monochrome photo into a color one with a simple click of your mouse.
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Photographer Shot ‘Ghost Girl’ Photos for Mom Arrested for Murder
One photographer received quite a shock recently when he found out that one of his clients had been arrested for murdering her daughter. He had been hired by the “grieving” woman to create Photoshopped “ghost girl” photos at the grave site.
Pennsylvania photographer Sunny Jo was originally approached at the beginning of the year by 23-year-old Jeanie Ditty, a soldier stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Ditty told Jo that her 2-year-old daughter had recently died after choking on a banana, and that Ditty wanted photos made to remember her daughter with. Jo, who specializes in such tribute photos, agreed to create the photos for free to help Ditty heal from her loss.
The resulting Photoshopped photos show Ditty spending time at the cemetery with her daughter’s ghost.
Last week, Jo was floored when he found out that Ditty and her 32-year-old boyfriend had been arrested for charges that include first-degree murder and negligent child abuse. Police say the girl, Mary Grace, showed up at the hospital with bruises consistent with child abuse before dying within days.
“I regret that I’m attached to a situation that is so evil, and is so vile,” Jo tells Fox News. “She seemed like a grieving mother […] [I wanted] to give her some peace… I was fooled.”
Jo has been criticized on social media for the photos, but he says he doesn’t regret making them, as he now considers them a tribute to Mary Grace’s life.
“The reason I am open and talking is because this girl was killed brutally and she doesn’t have a voice,” Jo tells The Daily Mail. “This whole thing is a tribute for Macy Grace.”
Image credits: Photographs by Sunny Jo and used with permission
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Missing The Moment And Capturing It At The Same Time
I see this sight with increasing frequency: people holding up their phone in front of their face, recording a cool event or situation, like a concert or speech, watching the three-dimensional live event through a tiny screen.
It’s a conscious decision, choosing to record the moment rather than experiencing the purity and reality of that moment. It’s a choice photographers know something about.
It’s true, a photographer walks and balances on a thin line between the world we inhabit and the world we photograph. We’re usually not the active participants doing the things that people in our photographs are doing; and we’re not the passive audience watching them. It’s a unique space between the two worlds that I know well and one that I’m comfortable occupying.
To do my thing I don’t need to be in the actual moment but need to concentrate and be in the “photographic moment”. It’s often a lonely pursuit.
I was thinking about this because I recently watched Ben Stiller’s re-make of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. There’s a scene that addresses the idea of putting the camera down to experience the actual moment–not through the viewfinder.
Ben Stiller’s character asks Sean Penn’s character — pro photographer Sean — who has been been waiting hours to capture a snow leopard that finally wanders into the frame–an obvious question…
“When are you gonna…take it?
To which Sean replies….
“Sometimes I don’t…if I like a moment…I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera…so I stay in it (the moment).”
Really? You didn’t take the shot?
It’s a great sentiment and I think non-photographers watching the movie can enjoy the scene and move on but for me, it took me right out of the movie.
It’s just not realistic and no photographer I know would ever not take the shot… but maybe that’s just cynical me. I can enjoy moments in my life when I’m not shooting, but when I’m with camera I much prefer capturing that moment rather than just seeing it. Every time.
I see photographers depicted in movies and often it’s just not realistic… a gang of press photographers awkwardly holding their cameras without fingers at their ready on the shutter release, and it takes me away from the story. I’ve seen it in big-budget films where there’s no excuse for the lack of attention to detail and realism.
(By the way, I don’t remember when in time the Walter Mitty film is purported to take place, but that’s a Nikon F3 Titanium — nice — and what looks like a more modern AF super-telephoto lens.)
In my photography career I have occasionally put my camera down for my own personal safety or out of respect for privacy. But if there is a great image in front of me, I may not always get it but I’ve always tried. In those situations I never put the camera down to enjoy the moment and not take the picture. In fact, if I see great pictures and don’t have a camera I almost look away. (Which is why I always have a camera with me).
I realize that photography is a big umbrella and I’m generalizing here but maybe there’s something about a photographers’ personality that keeps us on the line between living the life we capture and finding the perfect spot to view and record it. I’m basically shy and I thank my camera everyday for dragging my butt out into the world and bringing me to amazing places to witness magical moments I would never get to without it. No regrets; it’s who I am.
Though photographers don’t always participate in the life we shoot, our eyes are wide open, alive and on the lookout for beauty and meaning; something the people staring into their phones as they dangerously navigate the streets are missing. Good thing we were there to photograph it for them.
Where do you stand on this issue?
About the author: Steve Simon is a photographer based in New York City who’s obsessed with documentary photography and all things photographic. You can find more of his work and writing on his website and blog. This article was also published here.
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These Photos Show What a Peacock Feather Looks Like Up Close
Peacock feathers are designed to dazzle and attract a mate, but they’re equally amazing when viewed from up close. Canadian photographer Waldo Nell photographed one through a microscope, and the resulting photos look like colorful abstract art.
Nell shot the photos through an Olympus BX 53 microscope and a Canon Rebel T3i DSLR. Each image is composed of hundreds of photos that were stacked and blended to create single images with higher resolution and greater depth of field.
Nell works as a software engineer, but he’s also an “avid photographer interested in the extraordinary.”
You can find more of Nell’s work on Flickr and on 500px.
(via Waldo Nell via Colossal)
Image credits: Photographs by Waldo Nell and used with permission
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