Colorization

Good news - I have a new computer, finally, and I have Photoshop again. Thanks a ton to PJ at his Albums I Wish Existed blog for making a bunch of album covers in the last couple of weeks while I couldn't. By the way, in case you haven't heard, his blog was taken down due to a copyright takedown notice. He's replicated his blog here:

https://albumsiwishexisted2.blogspot.com/

However, he's taken down all links and instead will share music through SoulseekQT. As an aside, my music files currently are not being shared through Soulseek. However, now that I have my new computer, I plan on bringing them back to Soulseek in the next few days. I'll let you know when that happens.

One plus to working with PJ on album covers these past couple weeks is that he turned me onto a program called Pixbim Color Surprise AI. Basically, it takes black and white images and colorizes them. What's cool is that it uses some analysis to determine what the image is about and then makes intelligent guesses as to what the colors probably are. For instance, if it identifies light colored hair, it'll turn that blonde and if it identifies dark colored hair it'll turn that brown.

Normally, I'm not in favor of colorization because it doesn't look good. But I'm so impressed with this program that I bought it and I plan on using it to colorize the several dozen black and white album covers I have posted here. 

Let me give you an example. Up above is the cover I made for a Neil Young album some months ago. It's from so early in his career (1965 to 1967) that there are no color photos of him, so I took a black and white one and tinted it brown.

Whereas here is the version I just colorized using the Pixbim program a few minutes ago. What do you think? Is it better? Should I colorize more?  Personally, I'm pretty happy with it, and the colorization is mostly automated, so it's easy to do.

By the way, here's the link to the album in question, in case you missed it:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/01/neil-young-folksinger-demos-1964-1967.html

Here's another example, of a Joni Mitchell album cover. The old version is at top and the new version is at the bottom. I think the change is pretty damn amazing.

Here's one more that I feel I have to highlight. For some of the others that I've just done, I did some touch up work, either in the program itself or in Photoshop. But for this below cover of songwriters Bacharach and David I did basically NO touch up work. This is all what the program did on its own. (Note that I'm referring to the main image and not the text, which is a separate thing.) The program decided the shirts should be blue, and the background brown, and all the rest. So I was able to make this change literally in a minute.