Comment by sophacles
9 hours ago
There exist plenty of reasons to colorize grayscale photos in 2026.
* a huge corpus of historical imagery
* cheaper grayscale cameras + post processing will surely enable all sorts of uses we haven't imagined yet.
* a lower power CCD and post-processing after the fact or on a different device allows for better power budget in cheap drones (etc).
* these algorithms can likely be tuned or used as a stepping stone for ones that convert non-visible wavelengths into color images.
And that's just off the top of my head as someone who doesn't really work with that stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons I can't think of.
Grayscale cameras are not that much cheaper than color cameras. And if you decided to use a grayscale camera on purpose, you probably do not care about the color information (which would be totally "made up" by the colorizing algorithm).
Also, if there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.
What does the existence of a color photograph of my grandmother as an old woman have to do with my desire to colorize a grayscale photo of her as a child? Or colorize the photos of her wedding?
It's a very strange argument to make: there exist some photos therefore other photos may not be colorized!
Did you colorize grayscale photos of your grandmothers wedding?
Seeing that a "neat tool" exists and using that "neat tool" are two diffrent things. Google Glass was neat, too.
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