Can you recover the real colours of an old photo?

Can AI recover the true colours of a photo?

No, it can only guess them, because a black and white photo contains no colour information. Two objects of different colours but the same brightness come out as exactly the same grey.

So the AI picks the most likely colour for each element, based on what it learned from a vast number of colour photos. The mechanics are explained in how AI colourisation works.

Which colours are usually reliable?

The ones that vary little in real life: skin, sky, grass, trees, stone, timber. On those, a colourisation is often close to what you would have seen.

Anything that could have been any colour remains a guess:

• clothes, ribbons, hats and scarves;
• cars, doors, shutters and wallpaper;
• flowers in a bouquet;
• medal ribbons, cap badges and uniform details, which can also be smoothed if they are very small.

Why do some greys fool even the human eye?

Because early film did not see colour the way we do. Many older films were barely sensitive to red, which came out dark, and very sensitive to blue, which came out light.

A blue sky can look almost white and red lips or a poppy almost black. An AI can be misled just like a person, which is one more reason to treat colours as an interpretation.

How can you get closer to the real colours?

By checking the photo against what the family knows. A memory ('her wedding dress was ivory'), a letter, or an old passport or service record giving eye or hair colour are precious clues.

Other sources help too: a later colour photo of the same person, or regimental records and museum collections describing uniforms for a soldier's portrait. To work out who is in the photo and when it was taken, see how to date an old photo.

Can you correct a colour in Souvenotte?

Not one colour at a time: there is no manual colour picker. You can, however, redo the photo without colourisation for free, or choose a softer, sepia or black and white look in the Studio for a print.

If one exact colour really matters, such as a First World War uniform for a Remembrance display or a wedding dress, a retoucher can paint it by hand. When a human does better is covered in AI or a photo retoucher.

Should you keep the black and white version?

Yes, always: it is the original, and it is what counts for family history research. The colour version is an interpretation, lovely to give or frame, but not evidence.

A good habit is to name files clearly ('colourised') and to note on the back of a print or in a caption that the colours were added by AI. Future generations will then know what is original.