How to colorize black-and-white photos with AI so they look real

What colorizing does to an old photo

A black-and-white picture always looks like the past. The moment it has color, it looks like a day: sun on a porch, a blue dress, a red bicycle, rosy cheeks after a walk. That's why colorized family photos are shared so widely: they close the distance between us and the people in them, and grandchildren suddenly see their own faces in a great-grandparent's.

AI colorizers read the photo the way a restorer would. They recognize skin, fabric, wood, sky and foliage, consider the era from the clothes and setting, and paint plausible colors into the grey tones, keeping the original light and shadow underneath.

How to colorize a photo with Dromana

1. Step 1

   Scan it well

   600 dpi on a flatbed, or a straight-on phone photo in soft daylight with no glare. Crop off the table and the border if it's damaged.

2. Step 2

   Open the colorizer

   Go to colorize old photos. The prompt asks for natural, period-true color and leaves every face unchanged.

3. Step 3

   Add what you know

   “Her eyes were green, the dress was navy with white dots, the car was cream.” Specific details beat anything a model guesses.

4. Step 4

   Compare and keep both

   Check the faces against the original, then save the color version next to the black-and-white scan.

Getting natural, believable colors

• Start from a clean scan: glare and phone shadows turn into false color.
• Let the era lead: 1940s wools and uniforms are muted, 1950s prints are pastel, 1970s photos lean warm and earthy.
• Ask for realistic skin tones and say if the family has darker or fairer complexions than the model might assume.
• Leave grain and softness in: they're part of the period, and over-sharpened colorizations look fake.
• Generate two or three versions and pick the one that feels right to the people who remember.

Talk to the people who remember

The most accurate color information isn't in the photo; it's in someone's memory. Before colorizing, ask the oldest relatives what they remember: the color of the kitchen, a favourite coat, a grandfather's ties. These conversations are often the most valuable part of the project, and they're worth recording while you can.

Write the details down with the photo's names, place and year. Put them in the prompt, and in the caption when you share.

Photos of the same people across several years help too. If a color snapshot from the 1970s shows a grandmother's red hair or the green paint of the family house, use it as a reference for the older black-and-white pictures, so the whole album feels consistent instead of every photo getting a different guess.

Damaged photos: restore and colorize together

If the photo is creased, torn, stained or badly faded, use restore old photos instead. It repairs the damage and adds color in one pass, which looks better than colorizing the cracks. Our step-by-step guide to restoring old photos covers scanning and prompts in more detail.

Once you have a color version, you can take it one step further and let the people in it blink and smile with bring old photos to life.

Colorizing honestly

Colors added to a black-and-white photo are an informed guess, however convincing. For family history, genealogy sites or anything presented as a historical record, label the image as colorized and keep the original next to it. Don't present a colorized photo as an original color print.

Free results carry a small watermark; a plan removes it for prints and frames, and Starter's first month is $4.99 if you've never paid. Your uploads stay private to your account; see the privacy policy.