Bird Water

 This morning:

 23rd and 26th December 2010

Colourisation

I have been playing with colourisation tools. No, not paints and crayons, but software that colours black and white photographs automatically. It uses “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” through “electronic neural networks” “trained” on millions of colour photographs. 

“Wow! Fantastic!” one might say, but having once worked on the periphery of a team of artificial intelligence researchers, I remain sceptical. I used to go from “Wow! Fantastic!” to “Is that all it is?” in the space of a forty-five minute seminar. 

Carried out manually, colourisation is a skilled, time-consuming, labour-intensive process. As well as expertise in tools such as Photoshop and a level of colour-sense I simply do not possess, it can also involve historical research to indicate what colours the photographer actually saw. Experts can spend a month on just one picture. 

So, it would be wonderful to be able to colour photographs automatically. I found these free resources (it may not be a complete list): 

• Algorithmia: https://demos.algorithmia.com/colorize-photos
  
• MyHeritage: https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/02/colorize-your-black-and-white-photos-automatically-with-myheritage-in-color/
• Photomyne: https://photomyne.com/colorize-app
• Pixbim: https://pixbim.com/colorsurprise-ai-pixbim  
• Playback.fm: https://playback.fm/colorize-photo

With four of them you upload a black and white photograph to the web site and then download the colourised version. Pixbim is different in that you download and install a trial version on your computer and carry out the colourisation locally.

Are they any good? I tried them out on black and white photographs from earlier blog posts.

Bridlington c1929 - colourised by MyHeritage

Uncle Jimmy’s Bullnose Morris c1929 - colourised by photomyne

Bridlington 1955 - colourised by MyHeritage

Grandma 1963 - colourised by playback.fm

In general, the different tools gave different results and no one was consistently better than the others. I tried to pick the best result in each case but you might have chosen otherwise as I possess a different distribution of cone cells from most people. My choices might be a bit green, or a bit pink, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be able to tell. However, there were some truly awful ones, one of which seems to think I was wearing pissy underpants.

 

Colourised by Pixbim

Colourised by Algorithmia

Colourised by photomyne

Colourised by Algorithmia

Of course, we do not know what the colours really were, although I do feel fairly confident that the Bullnose Morris was not brandy coloured, and know for a fact that the Pratts petrol can on the running board was spruce green (#2e4a41), which none of them got right.

 

One test of colour accuracy would be to re-colourise an existing colour image after first reducing it to monochrome. MyHeritage does not seem too bad to me on the Abbey Road cover (I wonder if this was one of the pictures it was trained on), but they all struggled with scenery.   

The Beatles Abbey Road (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)

Spring Polyanthus 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by MyHeritage (right)

Glacial deposits in Glen Roy 2020 (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)

Johnson and Trump (left) recolourised from monochrome by Pixbim (right)

It is pretty impressive that black and white photographs can be coloured automatically at all, even though the colours are by no means accurate and not a patch on the original. 

Colourisation does seem to add something, particularly depth. Perhaps it works better with cine film, as in Peter Jackson‘s painstakingly restored First World War films (They Shall Not Grow Old) in which the moving faces of young soldiers, poignantly grinning amidst the mud of the trenches, become living people like us. 

I am not as sceptical as I was, but find myself thinking that with photographs it is probably better to stick with the original black and white. 

It would be interesting to see your efforts (irrespective of whether you call it colourisation, colourization, colorization or colorisation). 

FURTHER NOTES

I usually preferred MyHeritage, photomyne or playback.fm, but some reviews speak highly of Pixbim, possibly because it allows control over the colours (see below).

The colourised photographs are not always the same size as you started with.

There are other limitations too. MyHeritage permits a limited number of free colourisations (I’m not sure what it is, maybe 10, but me, Mickey Mouse and Billy Liar have all used our quotas) before asking for a minimum £50 subscription to its genealogy services. One should also be aware that the uploaded photographs are retained and may be visible to others, but can be deleted.

Pixbim (the one you download and install) allows you to adjust various processing parameters, such as colour intensity and colour temperature (from reddish to blueish), and provides a brush tool for correcting incorrect colours, whereas with all the others you get what you are given. However, the trial version of Pixbim comes with only a 7-day licence after which it costs £40. Also, unless you buy it, the colourised photographs have “Trial Version” printed all over them, but you can get round this using PrintScreen to capture a smaller version of the coloured image.

I also found mention of two other tools: Colourise SG which now appears to have been withdrawn, and Colorize Photo (www.colorizephoto.com) which assists you in carrying out the colourisation yourself, which I have not tried. 

July Hedgehogs

Following on from earlier posts of videos from the night camera, the hedgehogs have now returned. They are going into the home-made feeding box to eat the hedgehog biscuits which the mice have not found yet. One hedgehog is so fat it has a bit of a squeeze to get in. Here is a quick two-minute compilation of clips from the first half of July.

I don’t plan to post any more of these unless the camera picks up something really noteworthy, but here is a list of links to the previous compilations of videos and photographs.

Easter (12th April 2020)
Night Cats (5th May 2020)
Hedgehog Update (8th May 2020)
Snail Bogeys (12th June 2020)
More from the Night Camera (20th June 2020)

More from the IR Night Camera

A further compilation of video clips from the infra-red night camera (6 minutes)

Only one hedgehog this time: they seem to have abandoned us after the dry weather last month. However, the one that did appear put in a sterling performance trying to find biscuits it could smell but not reach.

Instead, we have been thinking up jumping and climbing and tricks for the field mice that live under the shed. I am fairly sure they are field mice and not house mice because they are lighter coloured underneath. We placed hedgehog biscuits on top of bricks and upturned plant pots so they had to climb, jump or run along a wooden ruler to pick up biscuits in their mouths and carry them away to safety.

This compilation is 6 minutes long. Some of the things in it (with timings):

• 0.00: mice climb and jump up to increasingly high bricks and plant pots; eventually they are too high for some mice to jump up.
• 1:20 the hedgehog appears and seems to be able to smell the hedgehog biscuits on the stool, but cannot reach them.
• 2:02: mouse cannot climb the stool.
• 2.35: “Black Kitty” shows interest but does not eat any biscuits.
• 3.00: mouse does not try to climb knotted string.
• 3.34: mouse picks up one biscuit and accidently kicks the other off the bricks.
• 3.38: robin.
• 4.51: mouse tries to jump across to bricks and misses.
• 5.40: mouse climbs bricks, walks along ruler and steals biscuit from snail (this is the clip used in the previous post “Snail Bogeys”).

Snail Bogeys

Children can be very fussy eaters. I was. As was my brother: for years and years, the only vegetable he would eat was peas. It might be genetic. One of our cousins would only eat one cornflake at a time.

Well, you reap what you sow, as they say, and in due course I experienced the joy of being a parent of fussy eaters myself. “I’m not eating that,” they would complain, “I don’t like it. It’s revolting.” Or “Yuk! It’s covered in nasty stuff”, or “Errrgghh! What are all these black bits in it?” and in the end you run out of patience and snap back at them: “They’re snail bogeys”.

It does not help.

But I had coined a phrase and in due course it became a family saying:

“What’s this?” “What’s for tea?”

“Snail bogeys!”

The kids tell me, should the blood line survive, that in two hundred years time there will be some exasperated descendant yelling at their infant offspring to eat up their food and “stop being so faddy because there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s only snail bogeys,” without either of them having any idea that one of their ancestors was the brilliant wordsmith who coined the expression.

Talking of snails, here is a still from the infra-red night camera mentioned in last month’s posts (it will take a day or two to compile another video of selected clips). You can see a hedgehog biscuit placed in the middle of a suspended wooden ruler, and a snail that has crawled along to consume it. This is one of the jumping and climbing tricks we have been dreaming up for the field mice that live under the shed, except the snail got there first.

Being cold blooded, it is not the snail that has activated the camera; it has been set off by Mummy Mouse on the ground. She bravely scales the bricks, nimbly tiptoes along the ruler and snatches the hedgehog biscuit right out of the jaws of the snail, from under its very nose. She dashes back down the bricks with it and darts under the shed to feed her mouse babies who are waiting for their tea. Because they are ours – i.e. they live in our garden – they too are fussy eaters.

“I’m not eating that,” they say, “It’s disgusting.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” she yells at them, “Get it eaten.”

“But what are these slimy bits?” they say.

“Snail bogeys!” she snaps at them.

Hedgehog Update

Last month’s video of hedgehogs in the night was popular (view again here), so here is an update with a bit of hedgehog history.

Some years ago we spotted a tiny hedgehog at the side of the lawn. It was lethargic and not very healthy looking. It remained there for several hours. We put it on straw in a cardboard box with some cat food and water, and kept it in the greenhouse for a few days. At first it slept most of the time. We called it Boris (which at that time raised no association with any other person of that name). It did not need a ventilator.

A few days later, daughter noticed another little hedgehog running along the road on the way home from school (we have very well-educated hedgehogs in our village). It was a good way from the open fields, so it seemed best to rescue that one too. We called it Bear.

Boris is shown above in his cardboard box, and below curled in a glove, with Bear on the ground. Tiny, little, weightless things.

Bear soon went off on his own, and after a few days Boris was running around in the greenhouse. He was quite smelly, so we gave him a bath and put him in the sun to dry. He climbed out of his box and ran off: a good sign.

We made a hedgehog feeding station out of a plastic storage box, and it was visited regularly into the autumn and each year since. One day, noisy crunching revealed quite a large hedgehog inside.

Last year, food continued to be eaten into the winter months, long after hedgehogs should be hibernating, so we bought a low-cost infra-red wildlife camera (a 20MP, 1080p, Apeman HSS for around £70, plus batteries and an SD card) to see if they were still active. It filmed only very fat mice, so we stopped feeding.

This year in early April, wondering whether hedgehogs were active again, or whether it had been only mice all along, we put out the camera again and filmed the hedgehogs in last month’s video. As the old hedgehog feeding station was holed and brittle, we left food in a dish beside the shed. Within thirty minutes it had gone, the culprit, Blacky Whitepaws, caught on camera. It was time to make a new feeding station.

Here is the new one beside the shed, with the wildlife camera tied to the tree. The feeding station is basically a wood-lined plastic box with a hedgehog-sized hole in the end (cut with a Dremel electric craft tool so as not to split the box), covered with a sheet of roofing felt. The newspaper on the floor is for the hedgehogs to read while eating (as mentioned above, they are very well-educated).

The camera is set to capture ten-second video sequences (there are now nearly a thousand of them), so there are jumps when the clips are stitched together (I could get the old laptop and use Windows Video Editor to make nice fades between the clips but that’s too much bother. I cannot understand why there is only a cut-down version in Windows 10). The assembled video is at the end after the following summary of its content.

The feeding station was visited by a large hedgehog on night one, and from the way it unhesitatingly went into the box, it had probably fed from it last year and knew what it was. It ate half the biscuits and then had a drink. 

The following two weeks were colder nights and there were only cats, mice and birds.

The mice seem to have had a litter of little ones which gradually became more adventurous. After a few days, they inevitably found the food in the feeding station and if you watch carefully you can see them jumping away with biscuits in their mouths and scurrying under the shed.

The cats clearly know about the mice. Stripey Cat lays in wait for ages but, so far as we know, has not caught any yet. Isn’t he handsome! Does that little mouse think he’s handsome too, as if hypnotised by fearful symmetry before being grasped in a deadly throat-hold?

We are not buying food for mice, so we moved the box to a different position. Two nights later, in slightly warmer weather, a hedgehog appeared in the presence of Long Legs. The camera shows what I’ve read elsewhere: cats and hedgehogs rarely bother each other. After Long Legs had gone, hedgehog returns and gives its ear a scratch, and then returns again after dawn.

Finally, we moved the camera to another position and caught a hedgehog rooting through the vegetation. Nights then became colder again and they have not used the feeding station for a while. Hopefully, by moving the camera around, it might be possible to track down where the hedgehogs are nesting.

It’s not exactly David Attenborough. Blogger Rachel sees hedgehogs all the time in rural Norfolk, and Elizabeth in Oregon (Saved By Words on Wordpress) has skunks, woodchucks, opossums, raccoons and coyotes in her yard. Even in ordinary English town and village gardens, there are things in the night we don’t see. Our cats know but never tell us. Here is the assembled video. The date, time and temperature for each section appear in the black band at the bottom.

Night Cats

I am going through the infra-red camera to post a hedgehog update video, which will take a while, but here for now are some stills of cat visitors caught in the night.

I would have loved one of these cameras when I was ten. I could have fixed it to a lamp post or telegraph pole to check up on Geoffrey Bullard. Even better, a drone. I used to dream of having a remote-controlled model aeroplane with a camera so I could make sure he wasn’t hanging around looking for bullying opportunities before I went out.

Anyway, back to the cats. Who, after all, does not delight in pictures of cats (apart from Geoffrey Bullard)?

Phoebe is not actually a visitor because she lives here and does not go out at night. Little Black Kitty lives in the house at the back where she climbs up and sits on the upstairs window sill looking superior. Long Legs lives next-door-but-one. We have never seen any of the others in daytime and have no idea where they live. I do like Stripey Cat. He is wonderful and will have a major role in the hedgehog update video. As will Long Legs.

Phoebe and Stripey Cat
Blacky Whitepaws and Black Kitty
Stripey Whitepaws and Long Legs
Patchy Face
	George (left) and Phoebe a few years ago

One other regular visitor, Ginger George, has not apparently been in the night recently. He is easily mistaken for Phoebe, even by us sometimes, but bigger. He’s the sort that sneaks into other cats’ houses to steal their food. He once squeezed in through our kitchen window. Completely fearless. The neighbours come round here to complain and blame Phoebe. 

You have no idea how much I had to struggle with the html to set this out like this.

Easter

With the current restrictions, how fortunate to live in a village and have a garden: not to be incarcerated in a flat in a city centre without any outside space. Here are some recent springtime photographs and a video of last night’s visitors caught by the night camera (assembled 10-second clips with time and other details at the bottom). The camera is tied to the apple tree above the primroses/polyanthus. We might have a scruffy garden but at least the hedgehogs seem to like it and appreciate the dish of water. Happy Easter.

That’s a very brave mouse you can just spot zooming across beside the first cat.

Bridlington

I like this photograph. It was taken in the late nineteen-twenties at the Yorkshire seaside resort of Bridlington. The location appears to be beside the harbour wall looking up to Garrison Street.

There is something about the figures, their clothes and expressions, the composition, the depth of focus and the greyscale tones that reminds me of photographs by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the celebrated Whitby photographer. They all look very serious, as if about to emigrate to the New World perhaps, whereas, actually, they are on board for a short trip around Flamborough Head.

My dad, aged about 7, is to the right with his Jackie Coogan cap tight on his head, and my grandfather, in front of him, looks very smart in a suit and flat cap. They seem to be the only ones without raincoats or waterproofs, unless those loose ones are for their use. None appear to have life jackets. One wonders who the others in the picture were: are they three couples or is one of the women the daughter of the older man: Somerset Maugham with a pipe? Who could now know? My dad could easily be assumed to be with the couple behind him.

We have lots of other family pictures at Bridlington in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties: in deck chairs, on the beach by the sea wall, digging in the sand, paddling in the sea, walking around town. One, some two decades later, shows my pregnant mum with my dad and others on the sands. Nanna is gazing down at her bump with me inside as if for a caption competition.

Later, when I was little, we continued to go to Bridlington. Here I am in front of the Spa buildings, digging on the beach near the breakwater in my baggy white underpants. They look as if they would still fit me. I bet they made wonderful car polishing cloths. We went on the same trip around Flamborough, and when the sea was calm Dad would hire a rowing boat and row us out beyond the harbour mouth. I also remember visiting the Flamborough headland and being frightened by the fog-horn.

I haven’t been back much since. It seems to have a lot of noisy rides and fast food smells now. But, hoping to repeat history, I went with my young family one day in 2004. The cold wind and rough sea were too daunting for a sea trip, so we drove to Flamborough instead and climbed the 119 internal steps to the top of the lighthouse, terrified of the drop down the middle. Scary place, Flamborough.

For the nerds amongst us, Flamborough Head is a promontory to the north of Bridlington, the northern end of a band of cretaceous chalk that stretches through Eastern England down to the South Coast. A  27-metre lighthouse sits on top of 30-metre cliffs, giving a range of 28 miles to the horizon, high enough on a clear day to be able to see the Humber Bridge to the south near Hull. Inside the lamp room, a four-panel catadioptric lens revolves around an enormous light bulb (in the top central  square in the picture) to create a signature code of four flashes every fifteen seconds. It continues to revolve even when the bulb is off so as not to concentrate the sun’s rays and start fires. The light was automated in 1996 but when we visited there were still reserved parking places for the non-existent staff.

Christmas Tree

80 year-old Christmas tree

I enjoyed reading last year about a 74 year-old from South Wales who still has his childhood Christmas tree. His parents bought it for around sixpence from Woolworths over eighty years ago. Obviously, it is artificial. The branches are wire and goose feather and fold up to the main stem for storage. He keenly remembers the excitement of decorating it each year. “... having an artificial tree was aspirational,” he says.

Ours was much the same. Here it is, below, in the corner of the front room in 1963, scanned from a scratched and blurry negative. Mum and Dad are sitting round the fireplace trying to read despite the disruptions of Sooty the cat, my brother, and the long blazing flash of a disposable magnesium flashbulb from my Brownie Starmite camera – my main present that year. Apart from the tree and a few paper trimmings, we don’t seem to have many other Christmas decorations. You didn’t need them with wallpaper like that.

For the rest of the year we stored the tree away: in the attic at the previous house. Dad used to greet it “Christmas tree, Christmas tree” every time we went up the stairs. We kept the tree decorations with it in large cardboard box.

Going by some of the junk I’ve posted about, you may be surprised to hear I no longer have the tree. But not to disappoint, I do still have the box and some of its contents. Here it is in the loft:

It describes itself as a bride cake box from Wm. Jackson & Son, Ltd. of Spring Bank, Hull, now remembered more as bread makers and supermarket owners. Exactly whose cake it once contained is one of those things I should have thought to ask when I still could. The box bears a testimonial from November, 1923, which was too late for my grandparents’ wedding despite my grandfather’s name written on the lid. It could have been my grandma’s sister who married in 1927. Could this be the cake: a tiny photograph found between the pages of a family bible I borrowed over twenty years ago? Again, we’ll never know.

And here are the decorations, probably from the nineteen-forties and -fifties. The coloured globes look similar to those in the newspaper article. There used to be more but, being glass, they shatter easily. We no longer use them. The bird – a golden Christmas dove – can just about be made out on top of the tree in the 1963 photograph. Other years we had a Christmas fairy. We used to put the candles on the tree and light them – and we lived to tell the tale. (an after-memory: Mum used to extinguish the candles by licking her fingers and squeezing out the flame. I tried it but was too hesitant and burnt my fingers).

At one time we had a set of hanging pear-shaped lights like those in the newspaper photograph. Before that we had some with plastic bell-shaped shades with nursery rhyme images, exactly like these. They were wired in sequence so when they invariably failed to work you had to check each bulb in turn. You could buy a special “flasher bulb” to make the lights flash on and off: no need for LEDs and digital controllers when you could buy a bulb with a bi-metal compound bar.

Yet my favourite tree decorations from all that time ago – two trumpets – were not in the cake box. Only one survives. It was with the decorations we use. It has a dangerously broken mouthpiece, but if you take care to avoid the sharp shard of glass and powdering lead paint and put it to your lips and blow, it still gives out a rousing rooty toot toot: Hail Smiling Morn! Well, maybe not quite that rousing, but the same unfettered childlike glee.

Added December 2020: another old Christmas tree from 1922 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-55234418