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How does Phot.AI colorizer feature work? Phot.AI photo colorizer uses advanced AI technology to automatically add natural colors to black and white photos. All you need to do is upload your image, and the AI algorithm will analyze and enhance the colors, making your pictures impactful.
Nov 11, 2023 · Using Kolorize.cc is as simple as uploading your preprocessed photo and letting the AI work its magic. The intuitive interface allows you to adjust settings to your liking, ensuring that the final result reflects the unique essence of each photograph. Whether you're looking to enhance the colors of a family portrait or bring a long-forgotten ...
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- Overview
- First step: how to scan your old photos
- How to colorize your old black-and-white photos
- Colorize (iOS)
- Colorize Images (Android)
- ColouriseSG
- MyHeritage
- Option three: the semi-automatic approach with PhotoShop Elements
- Option four: the fully manual approach with PhotoShop
How-to
By James Abbott
last updated 17 November 2020
Make the perfect gift for your isolating relative with this guide
Black-and-white photos are timeless, but learning how to colorize your old family snaps can give them a new lease of life. That's why we've put together this in-depth guide to help you do just that, whatever your ability level.
It's a great time to learn how to colorize your old, black-and-white family photos. With many of our loved ones in isolation, a colorized version of treasured memories could make a great surprise gift. And it's never been easier to do, thanks to a range of smartphone apps, online services and, of course, Photoshop.
If you've already got digital versions of your black-and-white prints that you're happy with, then you can skip this step. But if not, your first step is to get them scanned.
Scanning is a simple process – if you have a large number of old photos to scan, it pays to invest in a dedicated scanner, as you’ll get the best quality scans at a higher resolution than other methods. The Epson FastFoto FF-680W, which is designed specifically for quickly scanning prints, is our pick right now.
Today's best Epson FastFoto FF-680W deals
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Now you have digital copies of your old black-and-white photos, it's time to start colorizing. We've covered three options. Firstly, there's the fully automatic approach with smartphone apps – we've picked the best ones for iOS and Android.
If you want to get a bit more involved with fewer limitations, there's the semi-automatic approach with web apps and desktop software like PhotoShop Elements.
Colorize is a paid app for iOS offering a free, three-day trial of premium functionality, which later costs $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$7.99 per month. It's an expensive app for the long term compared to the Android app below, particularly considering there are free web-based options available, but Colorize does have one or two tricks up its sleeve.
One deciding factor for taking up a subscription to the app may simply be that you have a large number of images to colorize and prefer to do it on your phone. The fact that Colorize features the ability to scan photos from within its partner app, or to upload from the camera roll, is useful.
The app is fully automated so it’s simply a case of selecting the image to process and the app takes care of the rest. Colorization of images is more effective with simpler images than it is with more complex scenes. One downside of the app is that it reduces the dimensions of the output image, whereas the Colorize Images on Android (below) maintains original dimensions.
Download Colorize for iOS
Colorize Images is a paid app that offers ten automatic image colorizations before you’re asked to pay for a subscription for the app. Since the app uses the same processing algorithm as MyHeritage (see below), which is a free to use browser-based colorization option, the subscription is difficult to justify, though it's certainly fine if you only have a handful of images to colorize.
If you prefer the simplicity of using your phone rather than a laptop or desktop, it may also be well worth paying for a short subscription (there are eight-hour and one month options available). Despite using the same processing algorithm as MyHeritage, the results are different, and Colorize Images offers a small amount of control over how images are colorized too.
Two sliders allow you to control the process. While tips suggest how these help you to get the best result from photos with more or less contrast and varying image quality, the results of these tweaks can be slightly crude. In a nutshell, the Render slider produces a more saturated result at low settings and more subtle colors at higher settings, while Auto Contrast Cutoff is designed for use with low contrast images.
The overall quality of results are similar to MyHeritage, but colorization of elements within the scene do differ between the two.
ColouriseSG is a project that was created by the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Division, GovTech Singapore. The team put together a deep learning colorizer that was trained specifically for Singaporean photos, but despite this angle towards South East Asian skin tones, the automatic colorization works well for all skin types.
The highest resolution image we tried with the free-to-use service was 3500 pixels on the long edge, which was then resized to 1800 pixels in the output image. Results were better with the image featuring a plain background, although coloring of clothing was patchy. For the image with a more complex scene, colors were much less effective although skin tones were fairly reliable.
With ColouriseSG skin toning is much better than MyHeritage (below), but with the latter the coloring of clothes and environments is better. Plus, with ColouriseSG no watermark is produced on the output image, so although smaller than the original upload, the output image is untouched in this respect. To colorize a photo, simply click on the Captcha, select your image and wait a few seconds.
Go to ColouriseSG
MyHeritage is a genealogy website first and foremost but, as you’ve guessed, it also includes an automatic black-and-white image colorizer called In Color.
The fact that it’s a website designed for something other than simply coloring images means you have to sign up to use the free service. This only takes a few seconds if you use the sign-up by Facebook or Google option, or a little longer if you sign up by email.
The great thing about MyHeritage colorization is that the output image remains the same size as the original upload. Again, the largest image we tried was 3500 pixels on the long edge which is generally larger than a scanned black & white print. Overall, colorization was consistently applied across the image with no significant areas of greyscale remaining.
The coloring of clothing and the background is superior to ColouriseSG, but where it fell down in comparison was with skin tones. For both images tested, skin tones weren’t realistic for either image and in the outdoor portrait the faces of the people in the shot appeared burned out. MyHeritage also added a watermark and paint palette icon to the colorized image. Still, it's another good free option for those who don't want to take the manual route and want to keep the same image size.
Photoshop Elements 2020 introduces the ability to colorize black-and-white images using automatic, semi-automatic and manual approaches. The process is a kind of Guided Edit, but rather than being found in this part of the Elements interface, it’s accessed via the main menu under Enhance>Colorize Photo.
The results are superior to the phone app and web-based colorization options above in that Elements offers four colorization options to choose from after automatic coloring. The overall quality can be as good and bad as the web and app-based options, but where Elements excels is that you can use one of these ‘presets’ as a starting point to then tweak the effect in the Manual section of 'Colorize Photo' for a semi-automatic result.
This approach requires you to use the Selection Brush or Magic Wand to make selections of specific parts of images and then apply color to them. Alternatively, you can hit the Reset button, switch to Manual and color the whole image from scratch using this process.
The results can be better than the web and app-based options when taking more control yourself, but the overall result is far from professional hand-coloring in Photoshop. That said, if you have a copy of Photoshop Elements 2020 you can color an image semi-automatically in as little as five minutes.
For the very best colorization results, nothing beats using Photoshop and manually painting in every color using highly refined Layer blending.
The results are fantastic, but depending on the image being colored, it could take anywhere between 20 minutes to over an hour to hand color an image. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, to achieve the best results possible, here’s everything you need to know to get started.
The ability to mark images as having been adjusted also put her more at ease. Taylor also appreciates the ability to fix color photos that have faded or discolored over time. “It used to be that you just threw out those discolored family photos from the mid-1900s,” she said. “Now we can save them.”.
- Sunny Jane Morton
Nov 29, 2022 · But despite this, colorizing photos is still a great way to put a smile on the faces of living relatives. 4. Image Colorizer. Image Colorizer is another hassle-free tool to colorize black and white photos. You can ignore the pricing information as you don't need to create an account or pay to use the colorizer tool.
- Garling
- Staff Writer For Creative
Once you colorize a photo with Pincel, you're free to use it for your business, in marketing materials, or any other commercial projects. However, ensure that you own the rights to the original black and white image before colorization. Effortlessly convert black and white photos into vibrant and colorized images in seconds.
Users with a free plan can colorize and restore up to 10 photos for free. Non-subscribers will notice a watermark of the MyHeritage logo on the bottom right of their photos, while Complete subscribers will be able to produce colorized and color-restored photos that are logo-free. [/efn_note]
