Colorize black & white photos

Getting a natural-looking result

How it works

A photo has two parts: brightness and colour. A black and white photo only has the brightness. The AI model (DDColor) has learned from millions of colour pictures what things usually look like — blue sky, green grass, warm skin — and predicts a colour for every part of your photo. Those colors are then combined with your original brightness, so every detail of the original is kept.

The colors are a guess

A black and white photo does not contain information about the real colors. The model picks the most likely ones, so a dress, a car or a wall can come out in a different color than in real life. For historical or family photos, treat the result as an interpretation, not a record.

Photos that work best

Sharp, well-exposed photos of people, landscapes, buildings and everyday scenes give the most natural result. Heavily damaged, very dark or very blurry scans are harder. If the first result is too strong or too weak, use the Color strength slider.

Already-colour photos

If you add a colour photo, only its brightness is used and new colors are painted over it. To keep colors you already like, use a different tool.

Size, formats and memory

Images larger than 4096 px on the longest side are reduced to that size. You can save a lossless PNG or a smaller JPG. The model needs a few hundred megabytes of memory while it runs; if a very old phone runs out, try again on a computer.

Licensing and privacy

The model used is DDColor (Apache-2.0). Your photo is never uploaded to any server. Only the model file is fetched from a public server the first time. You are responsible for having the rights to the images you edit.