Colouring My World

There's a new post below the break, but some of you seem to need help with yesterday's joke. Try this ↓ in song.

Pardon me, Roy. Is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?

Pardon me, boy Is that the Chattanooga choo choo?

I figured that you were all old enough, but I am older than most of you, so . . .  

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You can do a number of things with AI in photoshop these days. I have already shown a recoloured photo of a scene with a fence and old truck. On the weekend, I decided to experiment with old family photos.

This first one worked out pretty well although you can see that some of the colours, especially on the wall, were not uniform. I think it did a pretty good job on the people, including little me.

I'll say that I was ~5 at the time, so circa 1952. My maternal grandfather is to my right. The other 2  are/were cousins of my maternal grandmother who had died several years previously. I have no memory of her.

We all lived in Montreal at the time although none of the adults were from there. (Technically neither was I, for I wasn't born there but lived there from about 2 to 15 years of age. I still largely feel like a Montrealer, though.) My grandfather was an immigrant from England, but my grandmother’s and these cousins’ families that had lived in Canada for much longer, their forebears having moved to Ontario form the USA after the War of Independence.

The two cousins were actually also cousins of each other, but they were brought up as brother and sister. Bill was born without thumbs, and his mother discarded him. Sadie's parents took him in, and he lived quite a successful life.

The next photo is of my dad and me, likely in late October or early November in 1947. The colour in dad's suit came out unevenly, the bottom being a reddish brown, so I tried to make it grayer more like the top. I didn't have complete success, but it was better than before. The AI did a good job on the grass and not too bad on skin tones. It is pretty remarkable really. Once upon a time, as an exercise, I coloured a b&w photo by hand (as it were), and it took more that a few seconds of sitting back and cracking my knuckles while the computer whirred away.

I tried a few others, but the colours were too wild and uneven, so I abandoned them. Then I did this one of my paternal great grandfather. He lived in England, and of course, we never met.

His jacket was two different colours, somewhat reddish-yellowish on the left, so I toned that down a bit. I also didn't think his hair was red, so I changed that manually as well.

I finally remember what photo I coloured by hand. I wonder if I can find it.

I can't find it on my computer, but it is on Flickr, so I am embedding it from there. It's from a b&w that I took of Shauna around 1974. I coloured it in 2007. Perhaps it isn't on my computer because I had a crash around that time. I shall remedy that by exporting it back to my computer. 

I see that I didn't manage to colour her mouth very well, nor her eyes.