MotionShine01 / Drop
Choose a photo
A black and white or faded photo, or a scan of one. JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC.
Free tool
Colorize a photo, black and white to colour.
Give an old black and white photo natural colour: skin, sky, grass, clothes. An open AI model, DDColor, runs in this tab and keeps every detail of the original, so your family photos are never uploaded. Full size, no sign-up, no watermark.
This runs in your browser. Your photos are never uploaded.
How it works
Three steps, nothing to install.
02 / Colour
Let the AI add colour
A few seconds with a graphics card. Drag across the photo to compare.
03 / Save
Adjust and download
Turn the colour up or down, then save the photo at its full size.
Questions
Good to know.
Which AI model adds the colour?
DDColor, an open colorization model by Xiaoyang Kang and others, released under the Apache 2.0 licence. This page uses its tiny version, in an ONNX copy made by edgetools. It was trained on a large set of colour photos to guess natural colours from the shapes and textures in a grey one.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The model is downloaded to your browser from Hugging Face, the open model library, about 130 MB the first time, and runs there. The photo never leaves your computer.
Are the colours the real ones?
No one can know the real colours of a black and white photo. The model makes a likely guess: skies blue, grass green, skin tones, but a dress, a car or a wall can come out a different colour from the day it was taken. Treat it as a careful guess, not a record.
Does it lose detail or make the photo smaller?
No. Only the colour comes from the model; the light and dark of every pixel stay as they are in your photo, at its own size up to 16.7 million pixels.
Can it fix scratches and tears?
No, it only adds colour. For a faded or soft photo, run it through the AI photo enhancer as well, and paint out marks with remove objects from a photo.
What about a photo that is already in colour?
The page reads only the light and dark, so the photo is coloured again from scratch. That can revive a faded colour print, but it replaces the colours that are there.