Colorize Your Black & White Photos

I’ve had to painstakingly manually colorized photos before, and it’s really not fun to do unless you’re bored, have ample time to kill or are just extremely patient. Well, I discovered a program that will make my life easier and your life easier, especially if you have a lot of black and white photos you want to colorize.

Recolored is a software application that helps you with the normally difficult and
time consuming task of colorizing black and white photos. Based on the latest developments in computer assisted image colorization, Recolored makes it possible for anyone to achieve professional looking results with a few clicks.
To add color to a photo, all you have to do is add markings to the different regions of the image, indicating how it should be colorized. Then click the colorize button and let the software do the rest.

I’ve heard mixed comments on the difficulty level of the software’s use. Some say it was a little tough to use, other say it was easy to use. Personally I find it simple and easy to use. Recolored’s website takes you through an easy to follow tutorial on how to use the software if you get stuck or just want to review it before you make an attempt to colorize your picture. If you don’t feel you’re savvy enough, it is definitely a good idea to go through it, and as long as you pay close attention to this tutorial, you should be able to master Recolored just fine. The software comes with the standard tools you would see in any photo editing program (i.e. Photoshop) including the brush, eraser and eyedropper tool. Then the color replacer and colorize tool makes it complete. Once you click the colorize tool, like magic you see the final result to your efforts.

Recolored’s website also shows you some photos that were actually colorized using the program. If you wanted to be creative with the program, I suppose you could also use it to add new life to your existing color photos, and not only limit yourself to the black and white photos.

Recolored was developed by Bertheussen IT in Norway, and is still in the beta (testing) stage. It is available to download for free, non-commercial use only. For you professionals, a commercial version will be released shortly at the beginning of this year. Recolor your world at www.recolored.com.