How to Colorize Black-and-White Photos With AI
Seeing a family photograph from decades ago in colour can be moving: the faded black-and-white grandparents suddenly look like people you could meet. AI makes it possible in seconds. But it's worth understanding what the AI is actually doing, so you know what to trust and how to get the best result.
What colorization really is
A black-and-white photo doesn't contain colour information, so there's nothing to "recover". The AI predicts the most likely colours, based on patterns it has learned from millions of real photos: that skies are usually blue, foliage green, and skin tones within a familiar range. The result is plausible and often convincing, but it's a well-informed guess rather than a record of what was really there.
What it gets right, and what is a guess
- Usually reliable: skin, sky, grass, trees, water and wood.
- Often a guess: clothing, uniforms, flags, cars, buildings and anything man-made, because the same grey could be many colours. A sari, a turban or a school blazer might have been any of several shades.
- Cannot be known: the exact shade of anything. If you know the real colours from family memory or records, trust those over the AI.
Prepare the photo
- Scan it well. Use a flat, evenly lit scan with no glare, in colour even for a black-and-white print, and save a lossless master. Our guide to restoring old family photos covers scanning.
- Repair damage first with AI Old Photo Repair. A colorizer adds colour, it doesn't remove scratches or tears, and any damage left in will be coloured along with everything else.
- Sharpen soft faces with the AI Face Restorer if needed.
- Colorize last, then crop and resize for printing or sharing.
If the print has a brown or sepia tone from age, converting it to plain grey before colorizing is worth trying, as it gives the AI a neutral starting point.
How to do it with Quikbench
- Open the AI Photo Colorizer and choose one photo, or up to 20 (15 MB each).
- Click Add color. Each photo costs 2 credits, and your 4 free daily credits cover two photos.
- Compare with the before/after slider and download each result or a ZIP.
The tool has no colour controls: the AI chooses. If you want to change a specific colour, adjust the result in a photo editor, or describe the change to the AI Photo Editor. The AI works at up to about 2 megapixels (roughly 1,600 × 1,250 pixels), so larger scans are reduced to fit first, and the page warns you before you spend credits.
Getting a better result
- Use the cleanest, sharpest scan you have. Fine detail helps the AI work out what each area is.
- Crop out borders and album edges that aren't part of the picture.
- Try again if a region looks wrong. A slightly different crop sometimes changes how the AI reads a scene.
- Look closely at faces, where colour errors are most noticeable.
Sharing colorized photos honestly
A colorized photo is an interpretation. If you share one publicly, or in a family archive, it's good practice to say it was colorized with AI, and to keep the original black-and-white scan alongside it. That way future viewers know which parts are the record and which are the AI's guess, and nothing of the original is lost.
Keep the original
Save your untouched scan as a master and treat colorized versions as copies. You can always redo the colouring later with better tools, but you can't recover an original that's been overwritten.
Add natural colour to old photos, one or twenty at a time.
Open the AI Photo Colorizer →