How to breathe colors into your black and white photos

Nowadays, full-color photographs are very common. But in the old days, the only one type of photos was black and white photos. You may have several black and white photos that record the lives of your grandpa and grandma. You want to see what their lives were really like. Or you want to share the colored versions of these old photos through social media. Therefore, you need to colorize the black and white photos. Many years ago, although digital photo editing already existed, it was still not easy for people to colorize black and white photos because doing this work required a certain level of knowledge. Only a small portion of people were capable of adding desired colors to the old photo. But things have become different today. Due to the development of photo colorizing technology, everyone can easily colorize black and white photos by using photo colorizing software. There are a large number of photo colorizers on the digital market. It takes much time to find reliable photo colorizers from the innumerable products. If you don't spend time doing so, please continue reading this article. In this article, I will walk you through two great apps with which you can easily breathe colors into your black and white photos.

#1. AKIVIS Coloriage

AKVIS Coloriage is a piece of standalone photo colorization software that promises natural-looking results. It works great for colorizing landscapes pictures, portraits photos, and life photographs. Because of a set of intuitive tools and simple GUI of this app, both beginners and professionals can quickly handle it. The supported image formats include JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIF, and TIFF. There are innumerable colors for you to choose as the desired color of the object you want to colorize. Besides adding colors to photos, it also lets you make colorful backgrounds out of dull images, remove the red eye effect, and correct colors. All in all, AKVIS Coloriage is a nice image color manipulation program to help you obtain natural colorful looking for your black and white photos.

Let's see how to use AKVIS Coloriage to breathe colors into a black and white photo.

How to breathe colors into a black and white photo with AKVIS Coloriage

Step 1.

• Double-click on the empty workspace to open the "Select File to Open" dialog box. Browse to your image, select it and click on "Open". Or drag and drop your image into the workspace. 

Step 2.

• Go to the right-hand panel. Pick one color for the object you want to add colors to from the "Color library", "Color", "Swatches", or "Multicolor" pane.
• Choose the "Pencil" tool from the toolbar in the "Before" tab. Outline the object in the "Before" tab. Press the "Start" button to start the colorization process. The colorized image will be shown in the "After" tab.
• You can manually edit the colorized image by using the "Recolor Brush" tool, "Tuning Brush" tool, or the "History Brush" tool in the "After" tab.

Step 3.

• Press the "Save" button to open the "Save As" dialog box. Type in a name for the file, choose an image format from TIFF, BMP, JPEG and PNG, and specify the destination folder.
• If you want to share your colorized image, click on the "Cloud" button and choose a service where you want to publish the colorized image. 

#2. Picture Colorizer

Picture Colorizer is a web-based photo colorizer developed by Vertexshare. Based on the advanced AI techniques in deep learning, this app fast detects the realistic colors of black and white photos and adds the colors to old photos automatically. The advantage of Picture Colorizer is that it allows you to batch transform black and white the photos into colored ones. The disadvantage of this app is that there are limits to the dimension and the size of the image you want to upload. You can only upload an image within 5MB and 3000px*3000px. You don't have to create an account to use the service provided by Picture Colorizer and the service is totally free for use. With regards to privacy and security, all your images will be deleted from the server everyday. Overall speaking, no matter whether you want to colorize classic film screenshots, portrait photos, scenery photographs, or animal pictures, Picture Colorizer deserves a shot.

Pros:

• Colorizing photos only requires some button clicks
• Easy to use.
• Batching colorizing photos is allowed
• No need to sign up for an account.

Cons:

• The size of the image you want to upload can't exceed 5MB.
• The dimension of the image you want to upload should not be more than 3000px*3000px.
• The supported image formats are merely PNG and JPG.

Now, let's dive into the part of how to use Picture Colorizer to breathe colors into a black and white photo.

How to breathe colors into a black and white photo with Picture Colorizer 

Step 1.

• Drag and drop your photo into the drop box. Or click on the "Upload" button to upload your photo.

Step 2.

• After your photo thumbnail shows up in the task, press the "Start" button. The uploading and converting process will start.

Step 3.

• Wait for a few seconds. You will see a red "Download" button when the conversion is finished.
• Press the red "Download" button and the colorized photo will be opened in a new browser tab. Right-click on the photo. Select "Save image as" to save it to a destination folder.

Summary

You may have some black and white photos of your family members. Colorizing these vintage photos adds vibrancy to them. The two photo colorizing apps mentioned above can help you breathe new life to your black and white pictures. AKVIS Coloriage is a desktop app for Windows, which offers a 10-day free trial and costs $75. Picture Colorizer is free to use and requires stable internet connection. Give them a shot and you won't be let down.