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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/experiments/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vubuBrcAwtY

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ty! i'm glad you enjoy the tool. As for whether or not this tool could replace a professional colorist, I think it depends on the specific project. For some projects, Palette could do a great job of automatically colorizing photos, and for others, a professional colorist would still be necessary to get the best results. Especially when the projects require historical accuracy or a high aesthetic standard. it also makes colorization more accessible, which leads to more opportunities to refine results manually or say print the results.

Even if the results are not 100% historically perfect, 99% of the hard job is done. Skin tones, plants, skies, water... they all look incredibly good, and the object segmentation is almost perfect too.

The tool seems to struggle with fabrics, but that part is by far the easiest to fix with a traditional photo editor.

Congrats man. You made my mom happy this evening. Please keep a free tier on your tool.

its fast and looks absolutely stunning but if you've done enough hand work you can still spot flaws (that are easy to correct by hand). The easiest to see is probably the use of black in parts of the face that are not dark shadows. Its slightly under-colored, it had to draw the line some place. It looks like black smudge's left and right of the nose. Then again, few/no one would notice without looking for it.

edit: if a human made these this comment would not exist. It makes A fun angle of AI, it can take criticism and do useful things with it. Many humans fail that challange.

Ten years ago at my first job I used to colorize photos professionally, seeing how this tedious process has been automated away brings me the same joy as when you automate a routine with a shell script.

Could it have been trained on work of people like you?

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