title: "Seeing Manga in Color: Playing Around with an AI Colorizer" date: "2024-05-20" excerpt: "Spent some time messing around with an AI tool that promises to add color to old manga pages. Does it work? More importantly, does it feel right? Sharing my thoughts."
Seeing Manga in Color: Playing Around with an AI Colorizer
You know, there's something undeniably classic about black and white manga. The stark lines, the play of shadow – it's a whole aesthetic. But sometimes, flipping through those panels, you can't help but wonder what it might look like with a splash of color. Not just any color, but something that feels right, like the artist intended, even if they never got around to adding it.
For years, if you wanted to add color to old manga, you were looking at some serious manual labor. painstakingly selecting areas, choosing palettes, hoping you didn't mess up the original line art. It's a labor of love, for sure, but not exactly something you could do for a whole volume on a whim.
Lately, though, we've been seeing AI pop up everywhere, and naturally, it's making its way into creative tools. I stumbled upon one recently that claims to automatically colorize comic panels, specifically geared towards manga. The idea is simple: feed it a black and white image, and it uses algorithms to guess where the colors should go. My first thought, honestly? "Yeah, right. Probably just a messy gradient." But my curiosity got the better of me. Could an AI really understand the nuances needed to turn black and white comics into color in a way that's not jarring?
So, I decided to give it a whirl. The site, textimagecraft.com/zh/colorize, is pretty straightforward. Upload your image, hit the button, and wait a bit. I grabbed a few random panels from some old favorites – a close-up character shot, a wider action scene, something with detailed backgrounds. I wanted to see how it handled different levels of complexity.
And... well, it was actually kind of impressive. It's not perfect, mind you, but it's leagues beyond a simple photo filter. The AI seems to have a decent grasp of context – skin tones appear where faces are, skies are blue (usually), clothes get plausible colors. It even attempts shading, adding depth based on the original line work. For anyone looking for a quick way to make manga pages color for perhaps a quick review or just to see a favorite scene in a new light, it's a surprisingly effective first pass.
What makes it stand out compared to maybe just jacking up the saturation on a gray scale image, or using a generic photo colorizer? It feels like it's specifically trained on illustrations, maybe even manga itself. The colors it chooses, while sometimes a bit arbitrary (it can't read the artist's mind, after all), often feel within the realm of possibility for a graphic novel. It respects the lines and doesn't bleed awkwardly like some simpler tools do. It feels less like a generic effect and more like an attempt at actual color application.
Of course, there are limits. Intricate details can sometimes confuse it. Sometimes the color choices are just off – a character's hair might turn an unexpected shade, or a background element gets a weird hue. It doesn't replace the artistic control of a human colorist. But as an automatic colorizer for anime art or comic panels, it's a neat trick to have up your sleeve.
Is it the best AI tool for manga coloring out there? Hard to say definitively without trying every single one. But from my quick experiment, it's definitely a contender if you want something fast and reasonably intelligent. It offers a glimpse into how AI might help bridge the gap between classic monochrome art and modern full-color presentation.
Ultimately, whether you prefer your manga in stark black and white or vibrant color is totally subjective. But having a tool like this that lets you easily experiment, to quickly add color to those beloved old manga pages just to see what if, is pretty cool. It doesn't replace the original art, but it does offer a new way to interact with it, maybe even re-ignite appreciation for those classic series by seeing them through a different lens. It's worth playing around with if you've ever been curious about adding a new dimension to your manga reading experience.