title: "Could AI Finally Make Colorizing Manga Less of a Grind?" date: "2024-05-25" excerpt: "Let's talk about coloring black and white manga panels. It's a huge task. I stumbled upon an AI tool claiming it can do it automatically. Skeptical? Me too. But let's see what happens when you throw some monochromatic art at it."
Could AI Finally Make Colorizing Manga Less of a Grind?
Okay, let's be real for a second. If you've ever tried to color a manga page from scratch – or even just a single panel – you know it's... a lot. It's line art, pure and simple, designed for black and white printing. Adding color? That's a whole different beast. It's not just filling in shapes; it's interpreting shadows, light sources that might not be explicitly drawn, textures, moods. It takes skill, time, and frankly, patience I sometimes run out of by page two.
For ages, we've either done it manually, spent hours in Photoshop or Clip Studio, or maybe hired a professional colorist (if the budget allows). Then the AI stuff started popping up. Generic image colorizers have been around, but frankly, throwing a complex manga panel at one usually results in a psychedelic mess or just dull, flat fills. They weren't built for the unique demands of coloring manga line art.
But things are getting more specialized. I recently heard about an Agent, you could call it, specifically designed for this kind of task. It's over at https://www.textimagecraft.com/zh/colorize, part of a larger suite of tools, but this particular one focuses on taking that stark, black-and-white comic page and giving it a color wash.
Now, my immediate reaction was: "Yeah, right. Automatically color manga? It's going to look terrible." My brain goes straight to splotchy colors that don't respect the lines, weird interpretations of shading, and just a general lack of artistic sense. Because manga line art is interpretive. It's not like coloring a photo.
But curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed a few random black and white panels I had lying around – something with dynamic action, something quieter and character-focused, maybe a landscape panel if I could find one. The idea was to see how it handled different scenarios. Could it actually understand what it was looking at?
The process itself is straightforward enough – you upload the image, poke a few settings if you want (though I started with defaults to see its baseline interpretation), and let it do its thing. It runs for a bit, and then it spits out a colored version.
And... it's interesting. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. If you're expecting a final, polished piece ready for print without any human intervention, you're going to be disappointed. There were definitely moments where the colors felt arbitrary, or areas that should be different colors were merged. Sometimes a character's hair would blend too much into the background or their clothes.
However, there were also moments where it got surprisingly close. It often did a decent job of separating elements based on the line work and even interpreting some basic implied lighting. For instance, on a panel with a clear speed line or shadow effect, it would sometimes lay down a color gradient that made... sense? More sense than I expected, anyway. It seemed to be decent at distinguishing between character elements (hair, skin, clothes) and background elements, assigning plausible basic colors.
So, is this the best tool for coloring manga line art if you want production-ready results instantly? Probably not yet. A human colorist's understanding of composition, mood, and stylistic choices is still leagues ahead.
But is it useless? Far from it. I started thinking about the potential. What if you need to quickly add color to manga online for a social media post or a preview? What if you're a writer wanting to give a sample chapter to an artist and want to convey a vibe? Or what if you're an artist yourself, and you just need a starting point? Manually flatting (laying down the base colors) is one of the most tedious parts of the process. If this AI can give you 70-80% of the way there with flatting, you could potentially speed up manga coloring workflow dramatically. You could use its output as a base layer, then go in and manually refine, correct, and add all the nuanced shading and lighting that makes a piece truly pop.
It also got me thinking about experimentation. What if you want to see how a page looks with a completely different color palette without committing hours to doing it yourself? You could potentially run it through something like this, tweak the settings or use its output as a non-destructive base to play with.
Compared to other generic AI colorization tools I've seen that just splatter color randomly, this one seems to have some understanding of structure, likely because it's trained on specific kinds of line art. It's not magic, but it's a step forward.
So, my takeaway after messing with it is this: Don't expect a magic button that replaces a colorist. But if you're looking for a way to get a quick color draft, a potential starting point for flatting, or just want to see your black and white panels in color for fun or quick previews, a specialized tool like this is worth playing with. It won't solve the "grind" completely, but it might just make some parts of it a little less... gray.