I recently came across Picture Colorizer; a free online tool that lets you produce stunning color pictures out of your old black-and-white photos. I used it with some old photos from my personal album and was amazed by the result. For example, this is a 1970 photo of my mother holding me:

Personal photos | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

The same photo after colorizing:

Personal photos | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

What’s amazing is that it literally took a few seconds for the software to colorize the photo. All I had to do was drag-and-drop it into the relevant field and hit “go.”

Colorizer also works beautifully with color photos that have faded with time. This is a 1972 photo from a birthday party:

Personal photos | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

And this is how Colorizer fixed it:

Personal photos | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

Pretty impressive, right?

How to Use Images

I confess that I’ve been caught up in the past lately and a tool like this has been invaluable in bringing it to life. But that’s not all you can do with it. You can also drive traffic to your website. You see, images tell a story just as well as words do. And posts with images invariably do better than ones with nothing but text.

This is where Picture Colorizer can shine. You may have noticed how more vibrant and engaging the colored versions of my photos were. You can often make your old photos more interesting if you turn them into color ones.

Pro Tip: Size Matters

While it may be a good idea to scan and colorize the largest possible version of a photo, don’t use that on your blog or website. Big images will slow down your website. Not only do they take more time to load, but they also degrade your website’s performance. Users on mobile phones, in particular, will appreciate smaller images as they take less time to download – and may even save them money.

To overcome this particular issue, you can compress your image size. With the compressed image size, your website’s performance will be significantly improved. Plus, users with any type of internet connection should be able to browse your website and its contents.

TinyPNG is a free tool that improves a website’s performance and speed. All you need to do is upload the image that you want to compress, use the compression option, and download the processed image.

Happy colorizing!