Heres one I did

This is the "White Rapids Mine" which was on Vancouver Island B.C.

nice job on the

nice job on the colorization

rich

Good Job

These look really good. I'm planning to tear down a 1700 sq. ft. railroad in preparation for a move to another state. I'm planning to model 1940s Pana, Illinois and it appears there are many photos available for reference. Just curious, how did you know what color to make the various items. Michael your tipple looks really good. How did you know it was red? 

Juxen, your color choices are also excellent and the finished product is great.

Mike

The program does it for you.

The program does it for you. I just used the link. The drawback is that you have to sign in to the site and shortly after you get inundated with promotional E-mails from them. There's probably other software out there, might give more control too.

Thank you!

Thank you Juxen for sharing this information!

I've been wondering what this car would look like in color:

Very cool!

Looks good!

Further colorizations:

MKT near Rocheport, heading east. 1931, export from MyHeritage, and export from Luminar.

1931, Boonville Depot.

1931, Colorized and Luminar

November 2020

How do it know?

Amazing to me that these colorization programs "know" what color to make each B&W pixel. I'm going to assume it doesn't take high order calculus to derive either because they colorized The Wizard of Oz quite a number of years ago before all of these s'ware programs were on the market. Probably simpler than one realizes....

I don't know about everyone else, but that November 2020 photo of Boonville depot is just sad - no tracks....

I have a photo somewhere of a

I have a photo somewhere of a scratch build of that mine and the builder made it close to that red so it didn't surprise me what the colorization did. What interest me is the brightness of the red on one of the coal cars. Not sure how accurate it is.

BTW, for those who may not know, the mine is the prototype of the famous "Jack Work Coal Mine" that appeared in the Oct.-Dec. 1959 MR and was later turned into a less detailed but very well known kit.

No, most of the Wizard of Oz

No, most of the Wizard of Oz was originally filmed in color - only the opening and closing scenes in Kansas were in B&W.

Most of the early attempts at colorizing classic B&W films were... not very good... and were done semi0-manually...   choosing a color form say, a dress, and letting software track it and paint it in the rest of a scene - a long, laborious process.

This new software seems to interpolate most likely colors from a grayscale and a basic AI of what is likely to be in certain areas of a picture. It would be interesting to see how it does for brightly-colored subjects that don't conform to usual color profiles.

Inaccurate

Michael, I wouldn't take any of these colors as gospel or anything. I colorized a steam loco that was in storage, and the stack was purple. It guessed that the black, sooty stack was in fact a purple color. About the best it does accurately is get the ground and trees colored in, but at least that helps.

An experiment

So I had this idea of taking a black and white photo of the original scratch build of the White Rapids Mine, done by the late great Jack Work himself and seeing what the software did with it. Worked pretty well but I'm not sure I can post it here because the original is an MR photo. We'd have to ask Joe. Along with the actual prototype photos I colorized, it's going to be of great help to me as I work to make my plastic kit closer to both the prototype and Jack's scratch build. Thanks for pointing me to the colorization site.

I could not give a hoot............

...................if the colors are "accurate" or not (you'll never know as the buildings and people who saw what color they were, in many cases, were long gone before color was invented!) but they sure do make the pictures nicer to look at, right?

Peter

At 58, I vaguely remember, as

At 58, I vaguely remember, as a child, having a B&W TV and seeing B&W photos from cameras but most everything was color by the time my memories come into clear focus. I don't know about anyone else but for the longest time I had a perception of B&W being dull, drab, lifeless and depressing and just all around "old". Putting in some kind of color, completely accurate or not, gives me a completely different perspective somehow.

Kodachrome Skies

Dear MRHers, 

I wonder if the backend AI is interpreting the greyscale tones based on known/analysed/AI-modelled film stock "colour mapping" performance, similar to the classic "Kodachrome" colour behaviour?

Happy Modelling,
Aim to Improve,
Prof Klyzlr

You can know about some of the colors...

I tried colorizing a BW picture of a ATSF GP7 in blue and yellow. GP7 no blue and grey for yellow. You do need to be thoughtful about the results. The purple stack on a steam loco is also a clue. Having done some family photos, I think that is what the colorizing websites are calibrated toward.

Few more

I did a few more, this time in Edwardsville, Illinois. Most of these seem to be from the early 1910's to 1920's, using  https://imagecolorizer.com/colorize.html as my base, then sending it through Luminar.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note the house at the left; still there a century later.

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NKP 890 in 1935.

Now, how about...

Dear Colourizer-Enamoured modellers,

Now, I can't help but wonder, who's going to be the first to build a layout,
(maybe a small/micro, just enough to work as a P.o.C.?)

which eschews "realistic color" painting/weathering of everything in the scene,
(inc scenery elements, oooh, challenging...   ),

but rather elects to deliberately and consciously deliver a "colourized" pastel-hued rendition of said scene?
(I know of a couple of layouts, particularly depicting war-era scenes, which have deliberately used "Black, White, and 15 shades of grey" to emulate B&W source-images, so what about a "colourized" model scene equivalent?)

Just thinking out loud...

Happy Modelling,
Aim to Improve,
Prof Klyzlr

Imagining...

I imagine it would end up looking like something from Walt Disney (the man, not today's corporation), with exaggerated hues and saturation, yet still seeming to be slightly washed-out.

I'm just waiting for someone to use these digital colorizers as a guide to painting, before finding out that the subject was in fact green, not red.

“Inaccurate” and the new reality

I can see a newbie, modeler or, worse, manufacturer finding that colorized boxcar and spending hours and hours replicating it when it has only the most tenuous connection to reality. 
 

Seein’ ain’t believin’ any more.  Photographic evidence like eyewitness “evidence” is fallible. 

Pandora’s box is open and chaos is loosed upon the earth.  
 

Best use - Photo Backdrops

Thanks much to Juxen for the shoutout and credit. It's been quite a revelation - literally and figuratively - but it looks like many of the comments here are focusing on the color accuracy. But for me, that's almost beside the point. As long as the colors aren't super inaccurate, they're fine. I'm not using these colorizers as a way to "know" what the past actually looked like.

For me, these renderings are THE BOMB for photo backdrops, as I outlined in the original post.

Check it out:

Sure, it's just a mockup, but it shows the true potential IMO. And as an alternative to hand-coloring old photos in PhotoShop, it's especially valuable.

I've been pretty busy at the day job lately, but I'm hoping to get back to the layout soon. In the meantime, I hope you'll check out my MRH blog here as well as my Valley Local blog and website.

Thanks again Juxen - glad you and the folks here are finding this helpful!

Chris

Chris

Thank you for sharing your findings! By the way, I found another image colorizer after MyHeritage started holding an outstretched hand at me: It's called  Colorize!. It's not as good as MyHeritage IMO, but it gets the job done of putting something down for color, which I can then boost in a photoshopping program.

That is a spectacular-looking backdrop!