The ideal Christmas gift for grandparents: colourise an old photo for someone you love

Last Christmas, I got my grandmother a time machine. It wasn’t a blue telephone box bigger on the inside than outside, or a DeLorean you need to drive at 88mph – it was a photograph.

No time lords or mad scientists were involved, just a printer’s built-in scanner and a website’s free trial. Nonetheless, the process still felt a little like something out of science fiction.

My grandad passed away last autumn. Naturally, the first holiday in his absence would hold a certain heartache, and I wanted to get my grandma something that was sentimental but not sorrowful. I can’t remember where I first came across the concept of colourisation, and I didn’t know what to expect from it. Thumbing through old albums to find a photo to try it on, I eventually settled on their wedding photo, ran it through an online colourisation tool, and was amazed by the results. 

On Christmas Day, we gathered and exchanged gifts, and as my grandmother was sitting on my parents’ sofa, a window in time opened up. She stepped through it, out of that living room and into 1960, onto the steps of the Edinburgh church she married in, one hand holding my grandfather’s, the other holding the most colourful bunch of carnations you’ve ever seen.

It inspired me to try out different services to see how they compared - read on to find out what happened.

By Jonny Martin, excerpt taken from Which? Tech magazine

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Colourise photos: how it works

AI-powered tools carry out the process, offering instant results, sometimes for free.

These tools use deep learning techniques and machine learning models that are trained on large datasets of coloured images and their corresponding black-and-white versions to learn patterns and relationships between the colours of objects in an image.

To cut to the chase: you give them a black-and-white photo, and they colour it in.

There are many services you can get to do this, ranging from free to paid AI-powered websites, to hiring an actual person to do the job for you.

For our quest to see which online service gave the best results, we ran a selection of black-and-white photos through the six most prominent colourisation websites, plus high street service Max Spielmann and Etsy artists. Below, you can read about some of the tests we put them through.

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Colourise black and white photos

Featured in the image below is world-renowned trumpeter Louis Armstrong in black and white. We ran this picture through six different colourisation services to see which was the best - and there were some stark differences.

It's important to note that the colours these tools introduce are not necessarily historically accurate. They aim to strike the balance between making the past more visceral (a historical picture feels much more relatable in colour) and actually taking us further away from it (you could argue the original black and white photos are historical documents, whilst the newly coloured versions are not).

Scroll through the photo gallery to compare each service to our original photo.

Most services dealt well colouring in the jazz legend himself. Note how MyHeritage (photo two) even has him appearing overexposed: an unhappy accident or an accurate calculation of how a colour camera would deal with his proximity to the flash?

But many struggled with the band behind him. There’s an iridescent look to their clothes across multiple images – a sort of oil-slick patina – and some have been left colourless.

Palette (photo one) was our clear winner. Even if MyHeritage’s overexposure might be more technically accurate, Palette’s is a more aesthetically appealing picture, devoid of any weirdness with the bandmates. 

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How accurate are the colours?

To test bright colour accuracy, we took this iconic image of David Bowie, changed it to black and white, and put it through two colourisation services - Palette and My Heritage.

As you can see, neither service could recapture the same brightness present in the original, with Bowie in full Ziggie Stardust mode, crimson dungarees matching his glossy lipstick-red guitar. 

Palette’s version (photo one) barely registers as a colour photo at first glance, with the bright reds diminished to the colour of an unhappy aubergine. MyHeritage’s (photo two) is a little better – at least the reds are still a shade of red. But it feels like part of a cheaply printed newspaper.

Online photo colourisation services compared

Below, you'll find a run-down of how much you can expect to pay for each photo colourisation service, and the limitations of the free versions.

We found that most free services leave you with tiny images that would look blurry if printed at any reasonable size.

Img2Go is a notable exception, but we think your best bet is opting for the MyHeritage free trial. Or, if you’re not comfortable with a trial and the expensive possibility of forgetting to cancel, Palette is a great option at a fairly low price. 

Etsy photo colourisation

If you want to ensure excellent results and are prepared to pay extra, we got good results with Etsy. We tried out three services at different price points – £4, £30, and £50.

The Etsy artists produced better results than their AI alternatives, and the ability to suggest specific changes was great. We had these artists recolour things like hair tone, the walls, and clothing details.

They were also responsive and polite at each price point; one artist even reconstructed missing corners, free of charge.

Max Spielmann photo colourisation

At high street store Max Spielmann, the process was similar, albeit with the added option of scanning the black-and-white originals in-store, rather than at home. Staff were helpful and keen to understand any specific requests and available colour references. 

The biggest drawback was time and cost – it charged £50 per image that was sent to the ‘editing office’ for colourisation, and it took two weeks.

That said, these results were the best of the bunch. All three photos were rendered with realistic colours and consistent levels of light and shade. 

You can find out more about its services on the Max Spielmann website.

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This article is adapted from an original feature published in Which? Tech Magazine, June 2023, by Jonny Martin. Research carried out March 2023.

Additional reporting for online by Natalie Turner, December 2023.