Colorize and Color Correct old photos

What features would you like to see in Pixelmator Pro?
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2021-11-24 14:50:00

The parts that seem to be missing in Pixelmator are tools to “enhance” scanned old photos with colorize for black and white ones using machine learning, and color correct old color photos that have changed color because of age, or an odd tint because the film was exposed to heat before processing or had other color issues.

Scratch removal and dust removal could also be added.

I honestly think it would be a game-changer for Pixelmator pro to be a once-stop app for the ultimate in fixing and enhancing old scanned photos and would also create different marketing that other photo programs are not doing.

Todays scanners can take a small picture and make it a giant resolution, so when scanning an analog negative, the "super resolution" doesn't really do anything, unless you are grabbing the picture from somewhere and it was a low resolution scan. But these tools would be assuming you scanned it yourself in high resolution.

There are website that do it, and a few apps that colorize black and white photos with various results. Some are better than others. There is another website that is designed to color correct old color photos, and yet a different one to remove scratches and dust. They are out there, but aren't as good as they could be.

With Pixelmator Pro, and how you can integrate most functions with the automation tool on the Mac, this would save me literally HOURS of time and anyone else trying to do the same thing I am—enhancing scanned photos.

Please consider these features, ESPECIALLY colorize.
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2021-11-25 13:40:43

Heya Jim! Thanks for the suggestions — both make sense and I can see how they'd undoubtedly improve certain image editing workflows. However, photo colorization is one complex and resource-intensive feature to develop which would make it a separate, huge project on its own. I'm afraid it's a bit out of scope for us at the moment with all the other Pixelmator Pro developments going on. Scratch and dust removal is probably a bit more realistic, but I don't want to make any promises we might not be able to keep.
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2021-11-26 21:29:59

The reason why I was asking is it may not be just a giant undertaking now. It seems that there are websites all over the internet popping up and offering it free, but they are website-driven. There are a few free mobile apps that do it as well. It may be the source code may be very "available" now, maybe even just buy the code from one of these guys.
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2021-11-30 08:57:07

Fair enough, I just know that our team responsible for all things machine-learning in Pixelmator Pro is very meticulous and I'm not sure if using an algorithm created by someone else would go down that well with them. :) In all seriousness, we've discussed automatic photo colorization several times internally and, to be fair, features like that are not exactly our goal with Pixelmator Pro. We'd like to focus more on giving you the tools you can use to achieve the desired effect rather than applying it for you automatically. I'm not saying we've ruled out this feature for the future completely, but for the time being, I think it's best to leave colorization to the developers who specialize in that.