How to colorize black and white photos

Coloring Black and White Photos

All of us have an older relative, whether they are grandparents or uncles mainly, who are about to meet a special date, be it a wedding anniversary, a birthday or any reason that morally compels us to make a gift. If we want our gift to be special, there is nothing better than photographs.

As they are older people, it is most likely that a large number of these photographs, especially when they were young, are in black and white. Although those kinds of photographs they have a special charm, we can give it a special and very emotional touch by taking a few years off by giving them color.

Obviously, I do not mean that we dedicate ourselves with Photoshop to go coloring each of the areas of the photographs imagining the colors that the color image could have presented, a method that was used many years ago to color black and white films, a tedious task that involved painting all the frames of the film (in cinema 1 second is 24 frames ).

To be able to color the photos in black white, like black white films, it is currently possible very quickly, since it is ordered in trained software (deep learning) to automatically detect the shades of gray in an image and translate them into the colors of the spectrum (artificial intelligence).

Digitize the images

There are many applications / services for coloring old photographs, both in the form of web services and in the form of applications for both desktop and mobile devices. But first and foremost, if we do not have the photographs scanned What we want to convert is to make use of Google's FotosScan application, an application that is available for both iOS and Android.

FotoScan from Google, allows us scan old photographs with our smartphone camera, framing them, without adding reflections and restoring them as much as possible (without doing miracles). This application is available for download completely free of charge through the links below for iOS and Android.

FotoScan from Google Photos
FotoScan from Google Photos
Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free

If we also use Google Photos, all photographs will be automatically uploaded to Google Photos, which will allow us to access them quickly from our computer, if we plan to make use of a web service or a desktop application, without having to send them by mail, bluetooth, downloading them with a cable to our computer ...

Colorize black and white photos via web with Colourise

Coloring Black and White Photos

Like most services / applications that allow us to color black and white photographs, we will always obtain better results if we use the images in the highest resolution possible. An important aspect related to privacy, we find it in that the images that we upload to this website do not remain stored on the servers, one of the common problems of this type of application.

Colourise works very easily. We just have to drag the image that we want to convert to the rectangle that is displayed on your web page, and wait a few seconds until it is automatically uploaded and colored.

Colorize black and white photos from your mobile

MyHeritage

Coloring Black and White Photos

MyHeritage is an application available for both iOS and Android that automatically converts our black and white photographs to color. This is not the main function of this application, an application designed to create family trees, trees where we can use the images that we color through it.

All the images that we convert, we can export them to our photo album to be able to use them for any other purpose that is not related to the application. The only but is that it includes a small legend with the name of the application is the lower right corner of the image that it colors.

Coloring Black and White Photos

  • Once we open the application, of all the options that the application makes available to us, click on Photos.
  • Next, click on Add photos and we select from our photo album which image we want to color.

If we have not previously scanned it, we can do it directly from the application by clicking on Scan photos and documents (Although the best results are going to be obtained with Google's FotoScan.

Coloring Black and White Photos

  • Once the image to be colored is found on the reel of the application, click on it.
  • Finally, we have to click on the colored circle located in the upper central part of the screen and seconds later the conversion will have been carried out.

So that we can check the result, the application shows us a moving vertical line that we can move from left to right to see how it was before coloring it and how you are after the change. To save it in our photo album, we just have to click on the share button, a button with which we can also send it by email, WhatsApp or any other application that we have installed on our device.

MyHeritage: Family Tree
MyHeritage: Family Tree
Developer: MyHeritage.com
Price: Free

Colorize (iOS)

Coloring Black and White Photos

Colorize is another of the applications that focus on allowing us to add color to black and white photographs, old photographs just like the previous application. In the App Store we can find other applications that allow us to color black and white photographs, but the final quality they offer is so low that I have not bothered to include it in this article.

Coloring Black and White Photos

  • Once we open the application, click on Scan or upload to Photo.
  • Then we click on Import and we select the image of the library that we want to use.
  • After a few seconds, it takes a long time compared to the other applications / services that I have shown you above, it will present the result to us.

That image we can save it on our reel or share it directly through email, WhatsApp or any other application that we have installed on our computer.

Colorize Images (Android)

Coloring Black and White Photos Android

Colorize Images is another of the solutions that we have at our disposal on Android to add a splash of color to black and white photos. This is the only application that allows us to modify some values ​​to color the image such as the rendering factor and the contrast, which although it is true, do not work miracles, if it allows us to obtain a better final result we are not happy with the initial conversion that you have created the application.

Colorize Images
Colorize Images
Developer: Colorize Images
Price: Free

Coloring black and white photos with Photoshop

Coloring black and white photos with Photoshop

Coloring photos in black and white and very simple with the applications / services that I have commented above. Although in most cases, the result is more than acceptable, sometimes it may not. In those cases, we should modify the grayscale of the photo and use these services again.

If we have time, a lot of time, patience and knowledge of Photoshop, we can use this fantastic Adobe editing tool, a laborious and complicated process that we will not explain in depth in this article. But to give you an idea, for color black and white photos, we have to select one by one all the parts of the photograph that we want to color.

Once we have selected all the objects that will have the same color, we must create a new solid color fill layer (the one we want to use in that area). For adjust color to image shadowsIn the layers panel we must select color blending mode so that the color matches the element we have selected.

Finally, we have to adjust the contrast of all the areas that we have selected and applied a color layer through the Curves to adjust blacks, the most important part of old black and white photographs.


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