I recently came across Picture Colorizer; a free online tool that lets you produce stunning color pictures out of your old black-and-white photos. I used it with some old photos from my personal album and was amazed by the result. For example, this is a 1970 photo of my mother holding me:
The same photo after colorizing:
What’s amazing is that it literally took a few seconds for the software to colorize the photo. All I had to do was drag-and-drop it into the relevant field and hit “go.”
Colorizer also works beautifully with color photos that have faded with time. This is a 1972 photo from a birthday party:
And this is how Colorizer fixed it:
Pretty impressive, right?
How to Use Images
I confess that I’ve been caught up in the past lately and a tool like this has been invaluable in bringing it to life. But that’s not all you can do with it. You can also drive traffic to your website. You see, images tell a story just as well as words do. And posts with images invariably do better than ones with nothing but text.
This is where Picture Colorizer can shine. You may have noticed how more vibrant and engaging the colored versions of my photos were. You can often make your old photos more interesting if you turn them into color ones.
Pro Tip: Size Matters
While it may be a good idea to scan and colorize the largest possible version of a photo, don’t use that on your blog or website. Big images will slow down your website. Not only do they take more time to load, but they also degrade your website’s performance. Users on mobile phones, in particular, will appreciate smaller images as they take less time to download – and may even save them money.
To overcome this particular issue, you can compress your image size. With the compressed image size, your website’s performance will be significantly improved. Plus, users with any type of internet connection should be able to browse your website and its contents.
TinyPNG is a free tool that improves a website’s performance and speed. All you need to do is upload the image that you want to compress, use the compression option, and download the processed image.
An alternative Colorizer tool is Image Colorizer by Image Upscaler. User-friendly and powerful, it’s part of a suite of AI tools that let you generate pictures or enhance your own. Try out these tools and let me know what you think!
Happy colorizing!
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Great tips. I’m going to try this tool. Can you colorize something that you’ve pencil sketches? I writing some kids story for our grandchildren and trying my best to make drawings with pencil, then copying the final version on a printer. If I don’t, then the pencil smudges.
I don’t know but would love to find out! If you try it, please let us know!
I did try it and it didn’t fill in any colors other than making the white background a little yellow. But it work amazingly well on coloring B&W photos of real objects.
Ah, I see. Thanks for sharing that!
I must give this one a go. I was recently scanning some old black & white photos, and I’m very curious to see what they’ll look like. Thanks, Nicholas!
The effect can be startling! Do let me know how it goes 🙂
An amazing tool. I’m going to save this one, Nichola. It will come in handy!
So glad you enjoyed it, Diana! Thank you 🙂
WOW! This sounds very useful. Will check it out. What else besides old family photos? Photos one took in B&W for artsy reasons decades ago that you could then have a color alternative.
Absolutely. It was interesting to experiment with different kinds of photos and settings. It doesn’t work as well with every photo but I did get some amazing results!
What a useful tool! Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Thank you, Sarah! Hope you find it useful 🙂
Thanks for the great tip, Nicholas. I have just downloaded the free version for when I get the chance to sort through some old photos.
Shared on Twitter too.
Best wishes, Pete.
The online version worked better for me, but maybe that was just on my PC. I hope you enjoy colorizing the photos!
That’s a brilliant link – thanks. I have so many of those photos that have faded or turned orange. Especially of the children. I’ll check it out.
Woot! So glad to hear you found it useful 😀