Ever want to colorize an old photo? There's a real art to doing it, but it takes a lot of skill and it's not easy. Using layers and getting the colors right can definitely be tricky. I've done it and it takes hours to get it just right. (And even then it can still look wrong.)

If you want to do a down and dirty colorization of a black and white photo, you can do it online at ColouriseSG. It's not going to be a detailed colorization and sometimes the colors will come out faded and looking a bit grungy, but it serves a purpose if you don't want to spend hours picking out the details and using masks and layers to do it yourself.

Pictures with a clear contrast and photos of people work best as you can see on the example below. Architecture and other man made objects fare poorly. But, the people in the picture look very good. Facial tones come out well.

The program uses AI to colorize, so it is bound to get better over time. It will be interesting to go back in a year and try a same photo again. As you add pictures to it, it is learning.

Before uploading pictures, please read the TOS and Privacy notice. The site is run by the Government Technology Agency of Singapore.

It's Friday! Here's a bit of free stuff!

I found a cool little site that makes monograms. See the attached coolness for what you can do! You can print it on some stationary, scrapbooking paper, make it sticky back put it on a pillow - There are a lot of possibilities here!
You have to give them your email address, but I've been part of the site owner's mailing list for a while now and they are good about unsubscribing and subscribing. Otherwise, just use a throwaway account.

Enjoy using Monogram Maker!

Today's software is GeoGebra. It's a collection of free software and online math tools for Graphing Calculator, Geometry, 3D Graphing, Augmented Reality, Graphing, Spreadsheet, Probability, CAS (A software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics - Yes, I had to look it up.).

I was amazed by everything that you can download and do at the website. All of it for free. There are lesson plans for teachers from Elementary grade level to College Prep and College level. There are fun exercises.

The FAQs, User Help and User Forum are all up-to-date, easy to navigate, and well done. As a person who deals with a lot of Linux software sites, I was incredibly jealous of their FAQs and User Help. If GIMP was that organized Photoshop would be out of business.
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Go to the GeoGebra website or click on the FB link and check them out. You will be amazed at what they have available for free.

It's Friday and I found a nifty freebie for you!
Have you ever wanted to send a large file to someone but your email service shook a finger and said, "No-no-no!" We've all been there.
That's where Smash comes in. It's a file sharing service with no file size limits. It's also anonymous. There's no registration required. It's a simple site to use. The files stay on the site for 14 days - Plenty of time for retrieval. You can also password protect your files. Recipients can preview the content type of the files before they download.
There are also no ads on the site. That made me side-eye a bit, but they offer a premium service (that's dead cheap) to continue hosting content for retrieval for 1 year. It also offers a customized, branded service with prioritized routing and a tracking and history dashboard. That explains the lack of ads. A site that's crammed full of ads rarely grabs the attention of people who want customized services.
Smash is one for the bookmarks for sure.

This is just a reminder to resist buying deeply discounted online services:

From Krebs on Security:
"Buying heavily discounted, popular software from second-hand sources online has always been something of an iffy security proposition. But purchasing steeply discounted licenses for cloud-based subscription products like recent versions of Microsoft Office can be an extremely risky transaction, mainly because you may not have full control over who has access to your data."

Read the rest of the article at the Krebs website.

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Free Friday is back! Today's Freebie is Photopea. It serves as a replacement for the quite expensive cloud-based Adobe Photoshop. (Doesn't replace the free and open source native program GIMP. I love GIMP.)

If you are a user of Photoshop, Photopea is super easy to use and it is full featured.

As a GIMP user, I had to do my usual tinkering around. But aside from the usual trips to the FAQs to figure out how to use some of the tools, it wasn't hard.

The tutorials are very good. There are only a few of them, but they are nice to have.

The FAQs are excellent. The FAQs are excellent because the Develops respond to questions. Seriously. They actually pay attention to the comments and respond. I know, right? There should be some kind of dev award for that.

Go ahead, give the free version a whirl. If you like it and want to get rid of the ads or just support the developer, you can upgrade to the paid version. The free version is great and the only tool you can't use is converting Sketch to PSD (no other program does that), which most people do not need.

Very, very cool online app! Click on the image to get to the app!