> Automating it is banal at best and dangerous at worst; colourised images risk distorting history.
There's a lot of irony in acknowledging this but not acknowledging that each and everyone of us has their own biases inherent to our perception and experiences.
Like the blue and white dress; we all perceive things differently even on identical images, monitors, screens, etc.
My post you are replying to contains the sentence "Doing it by hand (in photoshop or on a print) acknowledges the inherent bias that is involved in colourisation".
So because I didn't list out my argument with completeness, my argument is defective and thus it is laden with "huge" irony.
You're imagining this irony to suit your personal requirement that I am wrong or foolish.
But if you look at what I am talking about elsewhere in my comments on this topic, it is human bias that concerns me.
One of the things automated colourisation cannot get right is historical depictions of human skin. In a way that really matters.
Human biases will creep into automatic colourisation because they can't _not_ creep in: the test data cannot fully describe the subject matter so contemporary bias will take over.
One of the areas where this really matters is historical depictions of Black people. Automatically colourising a black and white photo of a Black person's skin will almost certainly get their skin tone wrong in a way that might well very significantly misrepresent their history.
The same is true in mixed cultures all around the world; colourism is as much an issue as racism.
People had different lives based on how their skin tone was perceived. Automatic colourisation will not (cannot!) automatically produce a colour image that fits that experience. Because dark skin can appear light (and light appear dark) depending on complexities of reproduction.
This stuff matters. Hence my position: if you wish to ethically colourise an image, first consider not doing it at all. Second, consider doing it by hand based on real knowledge of the subject (their lived history etc.).
I am fully cognisant of the bias issues here (well, as fully cognisant as a white amateur student of photographic history can be)
There's a lot of irony in acknowledging this but not acknowledging that each and everyone of us has their own biases inherent to our perception and experiences.
Like the blue and white dress; we all perceive things differently even on identical images, monitors, screens, etc.