Photo Colorizer
Natural colour for black-and-white photos. Pick a style, choose a model, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Pick a style on the left, then hit Apply. Your original stays untouched — you always see both.
How to use Photo Colorizer
Scan or photograph the print
A flatbed scan at 600 dpi is ideal. A phone photo works: lay the print flat, use indirect daylight, avoid your own shadow and any glare from the surface.
Choose the repair
Repair damage, correct faded colour, colourise a black-and-white original, or describe what the photo needs in a sentence.
Compare and download
Check the result against the scan at full size, then download at full resolution. Keep both — the scan is the document, the restoration is the reading of it.
See it in action — real before & after
Why use Photo Colorizer
What Photo Colorizer does
Natural colour for black-and-white photos.
The original is never altered
Your scan stays on your device untouched. The restoration is a separate file.
Physical damage repaired
Cracks, tears, creases, scratches and missing corners reconstructed from the surrounding image rather than blurred over.
Faded colour corrected
The characteristic magenta and yellow shifts of ageing colour film are reversed, which recovers photos that look beyond saving.
Detail brought back out
Contrast that has flattened over decades is restored, and detail buried in dense shadow or a washed highlight is recovered.
Faces treated with care
The face is the reason the photo is being restored. Features are reconstructed conservatively rather than replaced with a generic plausible face.
What Photo Colorizer changes
Colourise this black-and-white photograph with historically plausible, naturally desaturated colour: believable skin tones, period-appropriate clothing and material colours, and consistent light temperature throughout.
Your face, bone structure and skin tone are held fixed on every generation — only what is described above is changed.
Photo Colorizer for the damage prints actually have
Different decades fail differently. A 1940s silver print, a 1975 colour snapshot and a 1998 disposable-camera photo each need a different repair.
Faded colour from the 60s to the 80s
Dye layers fade at different rates, which is why these photos go magenta. Reversing the shift is the single biggest improvement available.
Black-and-white originals
Contrast restored, dust and scratches removed, and colourisation offered as an option rather than forced on you.
Water and mould damage
Staining and bloom from damp storage, which is what loft and basement boxes almost always produce.
Very small or low-resolution scans
Photos that exist now only as a small digital copy, sharpened and enlarged as far as the data honestly allows.
Key highlights of Photo Colorizer
Benefits
Reprintable output
Resolution sufficient to reprint at a useful size and frame it.
Shareable with family immediately
The usual reason for restoring a photo is to send it to relatives who have never seen it clearly.
Colour and monochrome versions
Colourise for impact, keep the monochrome for accuracy. There is no need to choose one.
No subscription
A one-time credit pack, credits that never expire, and no renewal.
Nothing to install
It runs in the browser on a phone or a laptop. No desktop app, no plugin, no account needed to look around.
What people use it for
What it is mainly used for
Natural colour for black-and-white photos. Pick a style, choose a model, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Reprinting for a frame
A restored file at print resolution, sent to any printing service.
Family photos from a loft box
The most common case by a wide margin: a shoebox of prints nobody has looked at in twenty years.
A single surviving photo of a relative
Where the photograph is the only image that exists of someone, restoration is worth doing carefully.
Funeral and memorial displays
Usually needed at short notice, from whatever print the family can find.
Prompt ideas
Describe the damage you can see and say what must not change. Restoration prompts fail when they are ambitious — asking for a photo to be "improved" invites the model to make a new one.
Name the damage
"Repair the vertical crease through the left side" is far more effective than "fix this old photo".
Describe the colour shift
"Remove the magenta cast from faded colour film and restore neutral skin tones" names the actual chemistry of the problem.
Protect the faces
"Reconstruct conservatively and keep the faces exactly as they are" is the most important line in any family restoration.
Say whether to colourise
"Keep it black and white" or "colourise with natural period-appropriate tones" — leaving it unsaid means the model decides.
Ask for era-plausible colour
"1950s colour palette, muted, no modern saturation" avoids a restoration that looks like a photo taken last year.
Address grain deliberately
"Reduce grain but keep detail in the fabric and hair" gets a better result than asking for it to be removed.
More about Photo Colorizer
The practical bottleneck is almost never the model — it is the scan. A 600 dpi flatbed scan of a print, taken out from behind glass, gives a result that a phone photo shot at an angle in a lit room cannot approach, however good the restoration is.
Photographic prints fail in predictable ways. The emulsion cracks along a fold, silver-based blacks fade to brown, colour dyes from the 1970s shift magenta, and anything stored in a loft gains water stains and a curl that cannot be flattened. Photo Colorizer addresses that damage from a phone photo or a flatbed scan of the print.
Restoration is not enhancement. The goal is to return the photograph to what it looked like when it was made — repairing physical damage, correcting the shift in the dyes, recovering detail the fading has buried — without inventing a new photograph. Where damage has destroyed information completely, plausible reconstruction is the honest description of what happens, and it is worth knowing which parts of a result are recovery and which are inference.
Getting the best result from Photo Colorizer
- Expect plausible reconstruction where damage destroyed detail, and look closely before treating those areas as recovered fact.
- For badly damaged photos, two conservative passes beat one aggressive one.
- If a face comes back wrong, re-run rather than accept it — variation between runs is significant on damaged sources.
- Start from the largest, least compressed original you have — a screenshot of a photo has already lost detail that cannot be recovered.
- Soft, even light in the source photo gives the best result almost regardless of what you are generating.
- Judge every result at full size, not zoomed out. Problems hide at small sizes.
- Generate two or three times before deciding. Results vary between runs, and the first is not reliably the best.
- Check hands, text, jewellery and glasses in any result before sharing it — those are still where image models most often slip.
It's free to try and runs online — nothing to install. Explore the rest of our AI Creative Apps, or open the full AI photo editor for more control.
