I was rewatching some of my favourite black-and-white films recently. Movies like 12 Angry Men, Psycho, and Citizen Kane and I started wondering what it would look like in colour.
Of course, I knew this would change the mood entirely. You’d lose some of the lighting choices, the heavy shadows, the contrast that gives black-and-white cinema so much power. But that’s actually why I wanted to know how it would feel and look.
So I trained a custom AI model to do exactly that. Not just a filter, but a model that could colourise black-and-white scenes, frame by frame. I guided the results a bit along the way to make sure the colours made sense. The process was slow in the beginning, but now it runs quickly and smoothly, especially for photos.
The emotional shift is fascinating. There’s something about seeing familiar moments through a different lens that makes you notice things you might have missed before.
I’ve added a few images below, mostly scenes from classic black-and-white films. Each one has a slider so you can drag between the original and the colourised version.
Right now I’m still working on rendering full-length versions of a few films, just for myself, but I’ll post them at some point. I really want to sit down and watch these movies in colour from start to finish and see how different they feel.
Drag the slider to compare black-and-white vs colour
Even though most of this project focused on film scenes, I couldn’t resist colourising some portraits.
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