How to Colorize Black and White Photos — and What the Colours Really Are
Colorize old black and white photos at full resolution with no watermark. How AI colorization works, which colours are guesses, and scanning tips.
Updated October 14, 20266 min read
To colorize a black and white photo, scan or photograph the print, open it in an AI colorizer, press Colorize, adjust the strength and saturation until skin and sky look natural, and save it as a JPG or PNG. A good colorizer keeps the full resolution of your scan and only adds colour, so every detail of the original survives. Before you share the result, it helps to know what the colours are: an informed guess, not a recovery. This guide explains how colorization works, where it gets things wrong, how to scan old prints properly, and how to bring back faded colour photos from the 1970s and 1980s.
How AI colorization works
A black and white photo stores one number per pixel: how bright it is. It does not store what colour anything was, in any hidden form. So no software can read the original colours back out of the image. What an AI colorizer does instead is predict them.
The model has been trained on more than a million colour photographs, and has learned which things tend to be which colour: skin sits in a narrow band of warm tones, a large bright area above a horizon is usually sky, dense texture at ground level is usually grass or leaves. It looks at your photo, recognises those kinds of regions, and predicts plausible colours for them.
The prediction is then combined with your photo's own brightness at full resolution. That is why the result keeps every grain, scratch and fine detail of the scan: only colour is added on top. It is also why the image colorizer exports at your scan's original resolution on every plan, with no watermark.
Step by step
Add the photo
JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP or GIF. Phone photos in HEIC need converting first — see HEIC to JPG.
Press Colorize
The first time, the colour model (about 33 MB) downloads once with a progress bar. After that it is cached and starts instantly, even offline.
Adjust strength and saturation
Both update as you drag. Pull saturation down slightly if the colours look like a postcard.
Check the photo type
Detect usually gets it right. Set Black & white by hand if a yellowed scan is being treated as a faded colour print.
Download
PNG, JPG or WebP at full resolution. Transparent areas stay transparent in PNG and WebP.
Which colours to trust
Some things in the world come in a narrow range of colours, and the colorizer is right about them almost every time. Others could have been any colour, and there the result is a reasonable guess.
| Usually right | Often a guess |
|---|---|
| Skin tones | Clothing, especially dresses and ties |
| Sky and clouds | Painted cars, doors and shopfronts |
| Grass, trees and hedges | Flowers and patterned fabric |
| Water, sand and stone | Uniform details, ribbons and badges |
| Wood and brick, broadly | Eye colour |
When the colorizer cannot tell, it tends to choose safe, muted colours — browns, greys, dull blues — rather than inventing a bright red that may be wrong. That caution is deliberate: a wrong colour applied confidently to a relative's face is worse than a careful one. If you know that grandmother's coat was red, that knowledge is not in the photo, and only you can add it.
Correcting the colours
Most colorizers give you only a saturation slider. The colorizer here also has colour hints on Pro: pick a colour and click the object in the photo. The hint goes into the model itself rather than being painted over the result, so it spreads along the object you clicked and stops at its edges — the coat turns red and the wall behind it does not.
Pro also offers a second colour style. Natural is cautious and restrained, which suits portraits. Vivid was trained to prefer richer, less obvious colours, which makes landscapes and street scenes livelier, at the cost of the odd unlikely colour. On the free plan you get Natural, one photo at a time up to 12 MB; Pro adds the hints, Vivid and batch processing with a single ZIP download.
Full resolution, no watermark, and the photo stays on your device. It all runs on your device, not our servers.
Colorize a black and white photoScan the print well first
The colorizer can only work with what the scan gives it. A few minutes spent on the scan improves the result more than any setting:
- Use a flatbed scanner if you can, at 600 DPI for a normal print and 1200 DPI for a small one you want to enlarge. See image DPI for printing for what those numbers mean.
- Scan in colour, even for a black and white print. It keeps the paper tone, which helps the colorizer tell an old black and white print from a faded colour one.
- With a phone, avoid glare. Shoot in daylight from a window, hold the phone parallel to the print, and do not use the flash.
- Crop away the scanner bed and white borders with the crop tool before colorizing, so the model does not spend attention on them.
- Leave dust and scratch repair until after. Colour helps you see what is damage and what is detail.
If the print is small — a 2 × 3 inch wallet photo, say — enlarge it with the image upscaler after colorizing. And if the scan looks flat and grey, a touch of contrast in the image enhancer gives the colorizer a clearer picture to work from.
Faded colour photos are a different job
Colour prints from the 1970s and 1980s often look washed out, pink or orange, because the dyes in the paper fade at different rates — typically the cyan layer goes first, leaving the print red-shifted. These photos are not black and white. They still hold the real colours of everything in the frame, just weakly.
So they need restoring, not colorizing. The colorizer detects this case: it measures how much colour is left in the photo, and when it finds a faded colour print it keeps the photo's own hues and brings them back to strength rather than replacing them with predictions. You can force either mode by hand — Faded colour for prints that have drifted, Black & white for a genuinely monochrome scan whose paper has yellowed so much it looks coloured.
Privacy for family photos
Most online colorizers upload your photo to a server, process it there and charge credits per image, because each colorization costs them computing time. This colorizer downloads the model to your device once and colours the photo where it already is. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no copy of your family photos on anyone else's server, and the free version is not watermarked. If you plan to share colorized photos online, consider removing EXIF metadata from the files first, especially if you photographed the prints with a phone that records location.
If you would rather keep the vintage feel than add full colour, a warm sepia or a two-tone treatment is often more fitting for a very old portrait — see sepia and duotone photo toning.
Frequently asked questions
How do I colorize a black and white photo for free?
Open the image colorizer, add your scan and press Colorize. The free version colours one photo at a time up to 12 MB, at full resolution and with no watermark.
Are the colours in a colorized photo accurate?
They are plausible, not recovered. A black and white photo does not contain its original colours, so the colorizer predicts them. Skin, sky and greenery are usually right; clothing and painted objects are often a guess.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The colour model downloads to your device the first time you use it, and every photo is coloured on your device after that.
Why is the first colorization slower?
The colour model, about 33 MB, downloads once. Your browser caches it, so later visits start immediately.
Can I restore a faded colour photo?
Yes. The colorizer detects faded colour prints and brings their own colours back to strength instead of replacing them. You can also choose Faded colour by hand.
What resolution should I scan old photos at?
600 DPI for a normal print and 1200 DPI for a small one you plan to enlarge. Scan in colour even if the print is black and white.