When I asked AI to colorize old family photographs, it gave my brother eyebrows that aren't on the negative. That's when I started thinking less about color and more about information.
Yes this is what A.I. does. It shows you a somewhat glitchy alternate reality where that photo is coloured in instead of black and white. So it might do seemingly strange things like upgrading technology and clothes and stuff to match what people wore when colour photos were a thing.
However, it’s relatively trivial to take the A.I. photo and use it as a colour-only layer in Photoshop, while preserving the original grayscale photograph as the source of truth. It might not line up perfectly but you can smudge it around a bit to fit.
Yes this is what A.I. does. It shows you a somewhat glitchy alternate reality where that photo is coloured in instead of black and white. So it might do seemingly strange things like upgrading technology and clothes and stuff to match what people wore when colour photos were a thing.
However, it’s relatively trivial to take the A.I. photo and use it as a colour-only layer in Photoshop, while preserving the original grayscale photograph as the source of truth. It might not line up perfectly but you can smudge it around a bit to fit.