Hey Guys, In this Article I'll be guiding you on how to bring old Black and white Photographs to Life. from Image enhancing, upscaling, colorizing, inpainting & outpointing using SDXL + SUPIR + FLUX + FOOCUS & Photoshop.
1st Stage (Clean up)
1st thing is 1st! The clean up process! use Photoshop or your choice of package to clean up. a little bit of manual work is needed.
Once you clean up the image in PS, bring it in comfyui and use this nodes to UPSCALE + SHARPEN + BW the image for colorizing process preparation. for low-res images, use upscaling factor of 2 & more. I use 2-4
2nd stage (Captioning)
Make sure to caption your images well for optimal colorization. cause it affects your colorizing fidelity down to a Jacket's buttons.
Good captions = better colorization.
Joy Caption: https://github.com/aidenli/ComfyUI_NYJY
Florence: https://github.com/kijai/ComfyUI-Florence2
WD14-Tagger: https://github.com/pythongosssss/ComfyUI-WD14-Tagger
3rd stage (Recoloring with SDXL Control-net)
Once you caption your image make sure to remove -VE captions like
"This is a black-and-white photograph of..., sepia tone, grayscale, vintage photo, old photo"
Just manually copy the generated text to your +VE prompts. use a "Text join node" for the main caption & a 2nd +VE prompt for colorizing.
Use Tagging method instead of descriptive. JUGX works well with tagging method.
Instead of using Control-net models like Line-art, canny or depth, using the original BW Image as an inputs tends to work well.
Secret sauce: use the control-net strength between 0.65 - 0.85
0.6 - 0.75: for Background, main body, & other features
0.8 - 0.9 : for the face or Likeness ONLY!
Control-Net Model: https://huggingface.co/brad-twinkl/controlnet-union-sdxl-1.0-promax
Use JUGX for colorizer: https://civitai.com/models/133005?modelVersionId=920957
4th Stage (SUPIR or FLUX Upscaling)
SUPIR Model: https://huggingface.co/Kijai/SUPIR_pruned/tree/main
SUPIR Node: https://github.com/kijai/ComfyUI-SUPIR
Flux Control-net: https://huggingface.co/jasperai/Flux.1-dev-Controlnet-Upscaler
For this stage use the 30 step JUGX Model: https://civitai.com/models/133005/juggernaut-xl
Upscaling Factor of 2 or more
Tip: If your photo is a Studio photo use "white Background" in your +VE prompt, it will brighten your colorized image even though the background is different you will fix it on post, later in photoshop.
5th Stage (Photoshop)
Once you did everything correctly bring both images at 0.65 & 0.85 strength final images to Photoshop & erase what you want to erase starting from the face, cloth, background...etc.
6th Stage (FOOCUS Out-painting)
As of Now, I'm only gonna use Foocus for outpainting, I know FLUX fill is out, but SDXL has more control & much faster for me...I'll update my workflow to FLUX Fill!
Again with out leaving Photoshop, just extend your image in all corners or with any resolution you want and save it as PNG or JPEG.
Make sure your extended BG is colorized to see the borders later in Foocus.
Use the +VE prompt from the colorizer workflow to Foocus.
7th Stage (Final Cleanup in SDXL & PS)
Once you have your out-painted image ready, make sure to bring it back to the 3rd stage for overall color matching & fixing small stuff to align with the original image + out-painted one.
8th Stage (Final Result with Camera post process effects)
9th Stage Extra Fun (Inpainting)
Help me bring Old Photographs to life! CHEERS!
