What you need to know
- Colorize was first announced back at Google I/O 2018.
- Colorize will transform your black and white photos into color photos.
- A beta version of Colorize is expected soon.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, Google made the announcement about its Colorize feature for Google Photos. Ok, so it wasn't actually that long ago, it was at Google I/O 2018, but it certainly feels like it has been that long.
Anyways, back in 2018, Google showed off Colorize at I/O, a feature for Google Photos to convert black and white images to full color.
This is a process which usually requires an actual human to go in and make decisions about adding color to different objects in the photo. Training a machine to do this instead is apparently becoming quite the undertaking, which is why over a year later we've still not seen this feature materialize.
The good news is that Colorize hasn't been forgotten and it is not vaporware. Recently, product lead David Lieb tweeted out about it in response to an article from Mashable, where it called Google out for the radio silence surrounding the colorful new feature.
2/ Here’s a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn’t wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg2/ Here’s a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn’t wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg— David Lieb (@dflieb) May 6, 2019May 6, 2019
His tweet shows Colorize in action on a photo from his 104-year-old grandmother's wedding day. He points out though that it still needs some work, specifically with Colorize thinking his grandfather wore pink pants when they should be white.
Lieb also continued on saying that the team hopes to have a beta version of Colorize soon, although there is no mention of when that could happen.
It may be taking longer than we'd like, but at least we know Google hasn't given up on the feature entirely.
