Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung’s Galaxy S24 phones have the ability to colorize black-and-white images.
- This feature was first revealed for Google Photos back in 2018 but has yet to land on the service.
- Samsung’s colorized photos are far from perfect, but this feature is still impressive as it’s running on-device.
Google announced a rather cool feature for Google Photos back in 2018, promising to let you colorize black-and-white photos. We’re still waiting for this feature to come to Google’s photo platform after all these years, but it looks like the option is now available on the Galaxy S24 series.
Tipster Ice Universe noted on X that the Galaxy S24 range indeed lets you colorize black-and-white snaps via the gallery app. We were able to confirm this functionality on a colleague’s Galaxy S24 Ultra and put it to the test. It’s also worth noting that this feature works locally, so you don’t need an active internet connection (a win for privacy).
Colorization on the Galaxy S24 series is hit-and-miss, though. It seems to struggle with people, in particular, as we can see below. In fact, it gave musician Doug Martsch an entirely different T-shirt color as seen below. The colorization also didn’t extend to the red and blue lighting cast behind him (but this is understandable). The colorized selfie image is far more accurate, although my skin tone and shirt color are much warmer than the original picture.
Moving away from people, the Galaxy S24 line’s colorization feature seems to fare okay when it comes to landscapes and buildings. The colorized image of the US Congress building is a solid effort, although the trees miss out on more vibrant autumnal hues and large parts of the building are now yellow.
The colorized picture of the iPhones is also a marked departure from the original, with a much colder overall white balance and the table in the background looking like a different table altogether. The iPhone colors aren’t spot-on, but they’re mostly close enough to the original hues and we don’t see any outright egregious color choices for them.
It’s still worth reiterating, however, that these colorized images were produced on a smartphone and without an internet connection (the phone was in airplane mode). So these pictures are still extremely impressive in their own right. We’re also guessing that Samsung will fine-tune the colorization feature for improved results.
