Colorize Old Portraits — Pro, on our server
Skin is where colorization is judged, and where it is least certain. Complexion spans a narrow band of hues and a very wide band of luminance, and black-and-white film records only the second of those. DDColor responds by predicting a warm mid-tone that suits the light it can see, which is convincing on a well-lit frontal portrait and drifts on anything shot with hard side-light, heavy studio powder or a strong backdrop reflection. Nobody in your family will notice a slightly wrong wallpaper; everybody will notice a slightly wrong grandmother. Plan on accepting the model’s whole-frame work and adjusting the face by hand — it is minutes of correction on top of a complete base layer, rather than hours of manual colorization from grey.
Studio conventions left fingerprints that the model has to read around. Cabinet cards and carte-de-visite portraits were made with painted backdrops, tungsten or magnesium light, and negatives that were routinely pencil-retouched to smooth skin and open the eyes. All three flatten local contrast, and flat regions are precisely where a colorizer becomes cautious — it will not invent a bold colour where the tones give it no reason to. That is why heavily retouched faces can come back slightly waxy while the sitter’s jacket and the backdrop look excellent. Give the model the whole card, not a tight crop of the head: shoulders, collar and backdrop are context it genuinely uses, and you can always tighten the crop afterwards with the on-device crop tool.
Order the two models correctly. If the eyes and mouth have gone soft, colour will not rescue them — colorization changes chroma only and leaves every bit of the light-and-dark structure exactly as it found it. Run the face restorer first, which uses RestoreFormer++ to bring facial detail back in old, blurry or faded photographs, and take its optional colorize step so the whole thing happens in one pass; that chained job counts as an HD run, of which each plan includes ten a month. If the portrait is already crisp, do not bother — colorize alone and spend the run on the next photo. For a set of portraits from the same studio sitting, the family album page covers keeping a batch consistent.
A face is personal data, so here is exactly what happens to it. Colorization is a Cloud HD tool and therefore the one moment your image leaves your device: it travels encrypted, is processed in the United States on Cloudflare R2 storage and a Modal GPU, and is deleted when the run finishes and in all cases within 24 hours. It is never used to train anything. The model that runs is DDColor and the tool tells you which model produced your file — the model can change, and you can always see which one ran. Cropping, converting and compressing all stay on your own machine, and the free tier never touches the server at all.