Old black and white photos retain their charm, but there is an easy way to give them a pop of color through the Colourise website. Especially the ease with which you perform this procedure makes it attractive to try the technique on a few snapshots of your family history. In the meantime, you immediately have a digital copy of the fragile paper version, the quality of which decreases over the years.
Step 1: Scan
You may have some nice black-and-white photos on your computer's hard drive, but old family albums especially contain a wealth of material. So you have to convert the paper version to digital in one way or another. If you have a scanner, the solution is obvious. Just as useful is Google's free PhotoScan app, which is specially designed for photographing old photos. There is a version for Android and iOS. Use the app in a low-reflection environment. Although the app itself brushes away any reflection, the photo does lose quality as a result. First you make sure that the frame of the app fits neatly on the photo and then PhotoScan asks the camera to focus on four dots in the picture. From each dot, the app shoots a shot from which it composes one photo, which it neatly crops and straightens.
Step 2: Magic
After you have put the photo on the hard drive, open Colourise.sg. Click on the red button Select photo and you load the black and white photo you just prepared. Colourise only takes a few seconds to colorize the photo. A vertical line appears in the center of the photo, which you can drag left and right to compare the result with the original photo. Colourise bases itself primarily on the skin tones, then it gambles on the other shades. That guesswork doesn't bother anyone, because nobody knows what colors it really was anymore. Yet the result remains very strong, the plants take on green colors and the silverware looks beautiful.
Step 3: Download
With the button Download result download the colored version, which is a jpg file named 'colorized-image.jpg'. It is also possible to bring in the comparison. Then click Download comparison and then you get the black and white version and the color version fraternally side by side in one photo file.
