Every day, the themes of artificial intelligence and deep learning are making enormous progress. These developments, when used well, make it possible to do incredible things.
This is the case, for example, of ColouriseSG, a free online tool that uses deep learning to colorize black and white images. Of course, the idea is not to find the original result, but to assign plausible colors to an image that is devoid of them.
Deep learning is a form of artificial intelligence that mimics the way the human brain works in processing data fed to it to create models that can be used to make decisions.
In the case of ColouriseSG, the model was trained on a database of over 500 old photos. And if you want to learn more, he talks at length about training the model in a blog post.
According to its developers, the model works particularly well on high-definition images, especially those featuring humans, and photos of natural landscapes.
Colorize a photo with ColouriseSG
To get started, go to ColoruriseSG.
Scroll down a bit on the home page and prove to reCAPTCHA that you are not a robot.
A “Select photo” button will then appear to allow you to choose a photo on your hard drive to colorize it.
The process will take a few seconds and your photo will be displayed with a slider allowing you to compare the colorized version to the black and white version.
Below the photo, you will find two buttons at your disposal. The first allows you to download your colorized photo and the second allows you to download both versions side by side.
As you can see, it works pretty well with this photo of children, but I also tested the tool with a nice landscape photo. After all, that's one of its specialties... And the result is really nice!
Article updated on May 6, 2025 by Byothe
