Using A.I. to colorize a black and white photo of a destroyed Klimt painting

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Originally published at: Using A.I. to colorize a black and white photo of a destroyed Klimt painting | Boing Boing

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I don’t see it mentioned in the article but it would be helpful to know whether blue-sensitive black and white film was used. This is the cause of the ghostly pale eyes in many early movies. This film would have greatly affected how each color appeared in black and white.

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Anyway:

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I agree with Director Kallir. They don’t really look like Klimt paintings to me either. Wouldn’t it have been a more useful effort in training the Ai to have use B&W prints of paintings we did have color prints of already for comparison? Google is so stupid. I don’t really see the point. Kind of like imagining dinosaurs were all brown and green. If it’s known to not be accurate, then what’s the point?

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somehow I’d think there’d be more gold than green in that painting.

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Yup.
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As if there weren’t enough reasons to hate Nazis.

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I’ve never seen those Kimpts before. I love them.

Also a big fan of his contemporary, Egon Schiele…

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I say this as an ignoramus who has only seen the dozen or so of the most famous Klimts that everyone has seen, but those paintings all look like collages of those same famous paintings. Is that something he did?

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What did you think of the pseudo-Schiele in the Grand Budapest Hotel?

(The Museum of Peripheral Art: Boy with Apple and a Pseudo-Schiele in The Grand Budapest Hotel)

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I haven’t seen that before! I really need to catch up on the newer Wes Anderson films.

It is a little raunchy, but his real work wasn’t much tamer. Very good emulation! I like it!

I freaked out when I saw a Scheile (hung the wrong way) in What we do in the Shadows.

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Far too many artworks were only documented in B&W. This area of colourization will improve over time, and though it will never replace the original, it will help to bring new understanding to the work.

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I love the job done. What expertise other than knowing how to negotiate a deal does this longtime gallery director know about Klimt? Why give her the space within your article to spread her “thoughts”? Thoughts and opinions are what got us into this COVID mess.

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That’s your thought and opinion on the matter, is it?

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I don’t know anything about automated colorizing of monochrome images. But having said that, I think that it would make sense to design it so that transforming the resulting colorized image back to monochrome and getting the original as a result would be a reasonable objective.

In the first colorized Klimpt painting shown, there is such a broad range of light vs dark from the top to bottom that it’s difficult to imagine how a greyscale film would have produced the original. The human body on the lower left is barely distinguishable in the colorized version. Could a camera have added more contrast and detail than the human eye?

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I’m really suspicious of AI colouring when it’s done blindly,. If you look at fashion plates of a certain era, riotous color is often popular, but if you judge by AI colorization efforts, brown is the perennial favorite-- even if the subjects are clearly able to afford something else.

Same with buildings. In certain regions, the architecture has a definite tint

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Is an AI going to read that as beige, or white sandstone?

An accurate color image can challenge our expectations, but sometimes a reconstructed image merely “confirms” what we think we know.

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Moreover, they could have tested the algorithm on black and white photos of surviving Klimt paintings but it seems that they didn’t bother.

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Klimt did use repeat motifs in several paintings, you will especially notice it in fabrics, but also in the composition and positioning of figures, weaving them into the foreground to reveal them.

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Considering she has curated over 50 museum exhibitions, including one on Klimt for The Belvedere in Vienna, probably a thing or two.

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For a better understanding of colourization, I think we would be better off seeing a live gradation/animation of color. In other words, none of the colours stay the same but they change in hue, colour, and saturation, like a living organism. You can sort of do this when you ‘grade color’ in the app Colortime which is essentially a colour correction app, but I would like to see more work done on this front.

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