How to colorize old photos in black and white (by hand or automatically)

Surely the possibility of having old black and white photos of your grandparents or relatives in full color has ever crossed your mind. The truth is that today there are already several tools that allow us to do this, both automatically and manually. In today's post, I bring you 2 simple black and white photo coloring programs. No Photoshop or complicated applications. Attentive!

How to colorize old black and white photos by hand

If we are looking for a program to color black and white photos manually, one of the most practical options that gives very good results is Colorize Photo Online. A web application that we can use from the browser of our PC without the need for registration, and which is also free.

This online application for coloring old photos works as follows:

  • We access Colorize Photo Online from the browser of our team.
  • Click on the icon "Open”Located on the left to load the photo in b & w to which we want to apply color.
  • Next, we will click on the icon "Open”On the right to load a similar color image from which to take indicative tones and colors.
  • Once we have both photographs on the screen, we only have to click with the mouse on the image on the right to copy that color. From here, we can apply that color by hand over the old image.
To color the photo on the left I have searched the Internet for a similar image to copy the color palette.

It is a manual process that takes time, but if we do it well we can obtain results much higher than what we would get with an automatic coloring application.

The application also puts at our disposal several tools that allow us to adjust brush thickness, opacity, and color hardness.

Once we have finished applying color to the photo we just have to click on the button "Save”To save a copy of the image.

This is what I have achieved in 10 minutes. Surely if we dedicate a couple of hours to it we can achieve very cool things.

Web application to colorize old photos automatically

The second application I want to tell you about comes from the hand of Algorithmia. A web application that takes care of automatically colorize a black and white photo, thanks to the Deep learning.

To carry out the process we only have to indicate the URL where the photo is located or upload it ourselves using the "Upload”.

The program will automatically apply color in an intelligent way to the image, allowing its free download from the option "Download colorized image”.

Amazing result! How did the machine know that the tie and belt were really red?

This is the fastest method of converting old black and white photos to full color. However, being an automatic process performed using machine learning, it may not always deliver the desired result.

It is a matter of testing and seeing if what Algorithmia offers us meets our expectations. In some cases, the colored ones are really impressive. We can access the Algorithmia web application through the following LINK.

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