As noted here: http://registry.gimp.org/node/24913#comment-10287

I just managed to resolve my issues with compiling (ended up downloading the dev version of libsuitesparse to remedy the problem).

I then used an image of myself, converted to BW for testing the plug-in (and the resulting plug-in application):


The original photo:


I only used six colors sparingly, as indicated on the mini tutorial. It's pretty impressive for an old plug-in that isn't being maintained. It works really well with cartoons and animated caricatures.

Are you saying that the plug-in will no longer be continued in GIMP or that Ubuntu discontinued it in their version of GIMP?

I certainly hope it won't be discontinued in GIMP; I use it a lot and also Colorify.

Nice job on your image!

This plug-in doesn't come with GIMP. It's not a part of the GIMP menu. I'm not sure this plug-in is one you're referring to. I have never heard of it until yesterday. Did you check the link back in MareroQ's post?

http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gimp-colorize

Original developers:
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/

I certainly didn't add it to my version of GIMP. It must have come in the Fedora version.

I checked in my Win7 version of GIMP and it's in there too.

Later: Oops! I saw the screen shot of it in your link up there. It looks very different from my version of Colorize. So it's a new plugin?

My version of colorize

Visit the bottom link. Definitely not the same plug-in. This plug-in registers under Colors - Colorization.

Screenshot:

Mine's in Colors > Colorize ...

@O, FWIW,

I had to go get the original source code and compile it myself. The pre-built didn't work for me in 64-bit Linux for some reason. Make sure you have the libsuitesparce-dev library installed.

http://zenthought.org/content/project/colorize

unpack it into its own directory, open a terminal in the source directory, then
make
make install

It was put right into the plug-ins directory, and the plug-in appears at the bottom of the color menu as Colorization.

I can't find anything called libsuitesparse-dev in my add/remove software.

I searched under lib, suite, parse to see if it would show up.

@Bob: I had to compile it for my machine, since the binary provided at http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gimp-colorize didn't work.

This works great on smaller images under 800 px X 1200 px. You're in for a long wait, otherwise. Some have reported experiencing crashes on large images.

I am impressed:

Customer scan of BW image. I asked for details on skin tone, hair color, eye color. I threw this into the colorization plugin and was pleased with the results, as was the customer:

Before and After:


What my color mask layer looked like before running the plug-in: