How to Colorize Black And White Photos From Your Nana's 50-Year-Old Album

How To Colorize Black and White Photos from Your Nana's 50-Year-Old Album

We celebrated my nana's 90th birthday a few days ago. She is a dynamic woman, who has seen everything from the world wars to the rise of capitalism and communism, sending a man on the moon, the liberal movement, and the tech revolution in the last three decades.

What I love most about my nana is her never-ending curiosity and zest for knowledge. Just the other day, she sat me down and started asking me all about AI. She has heard that AI is this magical new thing that can solve any problem in the world, and specifically, she had come to know that AI can help her colorize black and white photos from her old albums!

It took me a while to help her understand that AI is different from magic; it was more like math! I was happy to let her know that it was possible to colorize photos using the tools out there.

1. How Does an AI Application Colorize Black and White Photos?

Throughout most of the history of photography, it took manual addition of pigments by photography experts to colorize black and white photos. This process was painstaking; it required a lot of research, effort, and time from the expert.

Then along came Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI tools use millions of color photographs and their black and white counterparts to create a "model" of which colors are likely to fit in which scenario.

The machine then uses this model to colorize the photo pixels of your pic, bringing it to life at the click of a simple button. Isn't that amazing?

2. Is an AI Colorize Photo Application Enough?

So now that my nana knew how AI products colorize photos, she wanted me to show her how to do it to take all of her old pics of gramps and her holidaying in France.

As I started poring through her old pictures, I understood that it was not going to be simple to colorize black and white photos for her:

• Some of her pics were old, had creases and wrinkles.
• A few had been through flood damage and were faded.
• Others were shot in poor light and had regions of extreme black, which meant that even if I colorized the photo, I would still need a photo enhancer to bring it to the level of a normal photo of today.
• Another problem was that she wanted to take one particular pic of her and gramps standing in the fields of Nice, colorize photo details, and enlarge it to put it up on her living room wall.

I think these problems would be true of anyone trying to colorize black and white photos for their grandparents. These problems are bound to show up in any real-world picture, and older adults being what they are, expect their grandparents to move heaven and earth for them!

I understood that what I needed was a tool that had:

• An advanced AI model that could tackle fading and wrinkling in photos
• A suite of photo enhancement options instead of a simple colorize photo AI application.
• A tool simple enough for a 90-year-old to use. Nana had hundreds of photos; I had to teach her how to do the colorization herself. Photoshop and similar applications were out of the question; they are simply too complex.

Now that I knew what I needed, I turned to the internet to explore my options. These are some of the best tools that I found out there for my requirement.

#1. DVDFab Photo Enhancer AI

If there is one tool that I would recommend you go for with your eyes closed, it's this fabulous product from DVDFab.

Not only does this product have one of the most advanced AI models for the colorization of old photos, but it also gives you a whole suite of features that lets you work with the photo and bring it to near-perfect levels.

Let me share a bit about what DVDFab can do for you:

• Colorize Photos

DVDFab has a superb AI CNN model for colorizing photos. From what I understand, they have trained their model using millions of images across geographies, eras, and locales to create rules that add just the perfect amount of color to your photos in the right places.

The tone, texture, and quality of color added are simply amazing. In one particular case, I had another photo of the same place in France, which I recently took when I was there, as one of nana's old pics. I was stunned to see that DVDFab's colorized photo looked nearly as good as mine!

DVDFab recognized wrinkles in photos and worked around them, adding color to the wrinkle so that the photo matched up perfectly. It could even colorize black and white photos that had become faded and were turning yellowish!

• Optimize Photos

Some of the old photos were faded, and despite the excellent colorization work that DVDFab had done, they were still looking a bit old and jaded. Thankfully, DVDFab has an in-built "PhotoPerfect" Enhancer function that can sharpen and bring life to dull pictures, almost as if someone shot them through a DSLR camera!

I ran my colorized photos through the image enhancement option, and sure enough, the photos came out looking like a million bucks!

• Upscale Pics

Remember that one pic my nana wanted to put up on her living room wall? DVDFab made that job super easy for me. They have a proprietary image upscale model which can magnify your photo upto 40 times your current pixel levels.

After colorizing the photo, I upscaled it, and it came out looking fabulous! I kept that one secret from my nana and then had the picture printed and framed to hang on her living room wall for her 90th birthday.

• Reduce Blur and Noise

As you can imagine, many of the pictures were blurry and had a lot of background noise, making them distorted.

I found the best way to colorize photos of this kind was to first run them through the DeNoise and Sharpen features in DVDFab. After removing all the blurriness and noise, the Colorize photo AI model adds color details perfectly and makes the picture as good as new.

• Cartoonize

This is another brilliant feature that you get with DVDFab, especially if you have the kind of fun-loving and goofy nana as I do! We spent hours colorizing and then cartoonizing old pics of relatives and then comparing them to actual pics of how they look today.

• Easy to Use

Before I left, I made sure that nana understood how I was colorizing her photos to continue to do it on her own for more pics. DVDFab made my job super easy because it's got one of the easiest graphical interfaces to use among other such applications.

For those who have worked with Photoshop - you must know the kind of complex hijinks you have to do to add color to a simple photo. Well, compare that with this:

• Launch DVDFab, click on "Colorize."
• Click on the large "+" button on the screen, browse to your folder and select a photo
• Let the AI model load for a while. Once it's done, it will show you the before and after effect on the image.
• You can highlight any section of the photo to magnify the changes in that section.

That's it. Seriously.

• Pricing

After cramming all these features in a single product, you would expect to have to pay a pretty penny for this product. Thankfully, that's not the case here.

Firstly, if you just want to try out the product, there is a free trial option for five photos. You can check the quality of the output yourself, and you also get to see how easy it is to use.

If you want to get a lifetime subscription, it costs just $134.99. But I will let you in on a little secret. When you download their free trial option, the guys at DVDFab will give you a discount on buying the full product! You can also get the 1-year subscription for just $84.99 if you are hard up on cash.

#2 Photoshop

Photoshop is the absolute granddaddy of all photo and image editing software. First launched by Adobe in 1990, an entire generation of photographers, photo editors, and general photography enthusiasts have grown up learning the myriad features of this software.

Unfortunately, being as old as the photos themselves doesn't help Photoshop be the best to colorize black and white photos! Photoshop's Colorize Photo option is not very old. They came up with this feature in 2020, using their Sensei AI machine.

Adobe Photoshop has packed a pretty punch with this new update, trying to gain lost ground from competitors who have been sniping away at its market for years. While the Colorization option is awesome, two problems make it useless for non-professional users like me.

• Ease of Use

Here are the steps you need to use to get Adobe's AI model to colorize your photo:

• Select Filter > Neural Filters from their main menu. Get the colorize filter option by downloading it from the net.
• Click "Beta filters" to reach this new Colorize filter. Download it, and enable it to let it adjust the colors
• Enable Colorize filter and adjust the color balance as per your liking. Ideally, the AI will now fill up color as per their model into the pic.
• Make color choices
• If you don't like the color choices that the software has made, you have the option to make your selection. Goto the color picker and choose a new color for any pic area to change the color.
• To output the image, you have to choose which layer you want it in: Current Layer, Duplicate Layer, Duplicate Layer Masked, Smart Filter, or New Layer.

Now, do you think my 90-year-old nana would be able to understand all that? Not a chance!

The problem is that Adobe Photoshop is software meant for professionals, and Adobe makes sure that its product offers the choices and options that cater to that crowd. But for your at-home application, when you just want a simple solution, Photoshop becomes too complex.

• Pricing

Photoshop is advanced, so you get a lot of features that you probably won't get anywhere else. But then you have to pay through the nose for those features as well.

They offer a 30-day free trial with a limit of 10 pictures to edit. But after that, a one-month subscription costs you $31.49, and a 1-yr plan will cost you $239.88 (almost thrice that of DVDFab). They don't have a one-time buy plan at all.

#3 Colorize (iPhone & Android) by Photomyne

If you're looking to colorize black and white photos that you have already scanned into your mobile phone, Colorize is one of the best AI-based apps that can do this for you.

However, there are quite a few problems, at least with the app's free version. For example, you cannot use stored photos from your phone to colorize. It has to be either scanned fresh, or else you have to upload it to the cloud.

Another problem is the subscription fees. They do have an option to use Colorize with full features for two years at a low price ($39.99), but the regular yearly fee is $29.99, which seems a bit high because Colorize doesn't do image upscaling or photo enhancement. Colorize is mostly used only to colorize photos.

3. How Do These 3 Choices Compare With Each Other?

I drew up a small comparison table between these three products for your benefit:

Overall, DVDFab was the perfect product for my little home project with Nana, and I think for most applications it performed exceptionally well both in quality and in terms of the price that I paid for it.

I would recommend others like me who have only a little bit of technical knowledge to try this tool for colorizing photos and see the results for themselves.

So now over to you: which AI photo colorizer would you buy?