Direct links
-
Breathe new life into old family photos
Key findings
- Palette.fm offers great colorization options with prices starting at $49 for 75 photos.
- MyHeritage offers high-quality colorized images, but the full subscription is expensive at $184.
- Hotpot is a trusted option for colorizing photos and offers limited free downloads and 1000 credits for $12.
These sites use AI to help you convert old black and white photos to color, and the results are amazing. The key is to find a site that balances quality and price for the size of your project. Most offer free options that you can try out, too.
Breathe new life into old family photos
Converting old black and white family photos into color is incredibly fascinating and easy to do yourself thanks to AI technology.
I wanted to keep my family photos private, so to demonstrate these AI tools I will use some photos from a collection of free-to-use images on the Library of Congress website.
So far, AI cannot produce historically accurate colors. That would require a historian and a Photoshop expert to research the people in the image and the time period and produce something realistic.
For most people, myself included, accuracy is not important. What is important is that some colors were applied reasonably realistically to make my old family photos more vibrant. Like reading a magazine versus a novel, adding color to black and white photos makes it more entertaining to stop and think about what life was like back then.
The first few entries were impressive, but I’ve also included some alternatives since pricing plans vary significantly from site to site.
Of all the AI colorizers I’ve tried, Palette.fm takes the top spot because it’s extremely intuitive to use while producing fantastic results.
There are two outstanding features: the first is the range of color options you can choose from. The second is the ability to change the written description of the image, which allows you to improve the results or try a different color style.
You can test as many photos as you want and download them in 500×500 resolution, but with Palette.fm watermark. When you open an account you can get 1 free credit.
Once I started colorizing old photos, I couldn’t stop. For a one-time fee of $49, you could have 75 photos developed, a good sum if you put together a slideshow of old family photos or printed the photos and made a scrapbook.
If you’re looking to take on a larger project and go through tons of old images, $72 for a yearly subscription will get you 480 credits and several albums full of beautifully colorized images.
There are a number of other options beyond those mentioned, so be sure to check out what’s on offer.
This website is known for its genealogy services, which can be used to do things like track down family members or create a family tree, but it also has a great tool for converting black and white photos to color.
Unlike Palette.fm, it only creates a colored version of your photo without allowing you to change the coloring. I found the quality of the results to be high and the images turned out beautiful, so the lack of customization options wasn’t that much of a concern.
The website is clean and easy to use. All you have to do is drag and drop an image to start the process. You will be asked to create an account to see the results. Click the download button if you want to save the image, but it will be watermarked.
To remove the watermark, you’ll need a “Complete” subscription. The good thing is that this annual subscription allows you to use the coloring tool unlimited times. The bad thing is that it will cost you $184. Not exactly a good value for single photos or small projects.
MyHeritage also has a quirky AI tool for animating old photos, but unless you’re serious about using the core services, a subscription probably isn’t worth it.
There are many websites that offer AI coloring tools, and their trustworthiness is hard to verify. However, Hotpot has been around for a long time and is a safe option. It clearly works better on some images than others, so some misses are to be expected.
One advantage of Hotpot is that you can colorize and download images with limited file size for free. If you resize the image to full, the cost of image editing is 25 credits. You can purchase 1000 credits for $12 one time, which will get you about 40 images.
Hotpot was developed on the same code as MyHeritiage, but lacks some of the later advancements that were licensed exclusively to MyHeritage. However, if you have a ton of black and white family photos that you want to run through a website and you don’t mind low resolution, Hotpot might be for you.
Img2Go offers many different editing tools in one place, including an AI colorizer. Unfortunately, the results can be patchy, in some cases literally. In the image above, you can see that the skin around the hands has gray patches.
There are two controls that allow you to change the results, but their function is not entirely clear. One of the options is to change the AI model from “Humans and Nature” to “General.” The other is a render factor setting, suggesting that increasing the number may improve quality.
You get 10 free credits that you can use to download a low-resolution image without a watermark, so if you’re short on cash, this site is a great place to download a few free images.
Bringing old black and white images back to life using AI can be a fascinating trip down memory lane, and it can be incredible to see these images revived with color and detail. Whether you want to add a modern touch to your old family photos or are just curious about the possibilities of AI, try out these tools and see what you get.
