Recolor a photo

Colourise a monochrome image

Give a black-and-white picture one warm tint, with every shadow kept.

or drop it here · paste works too

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or iPhone HEIC

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Free · No account · Photo stays on your device

A house-and-tree scene, grey on the left and in colour on the rightBeforeAfter
Grey → colour

One hue across the whole visible frame, with the original lightness of every highlight, mid-tone and shadow kept in place. It is a tint and not a reconstruction: nothing here knows what colour anything was, and no model is downloaded to guess.

What else the editor can do
  • A hue dial: drag the band to widen the selection, drag the knob to move it
  • A region brush for the object a colour alone cannot isolate
  • The picture's own palette, and brand colours you save
  • Four to eight colour variants, saved one at a time or as a ZIP
  • Black and white with filter looks, colour splash, sepia toning, hue rotation and mapping onto your own palette
  • Rectangles and ellipses by number, and an optional on-device person and face finder

Open an image, then pick the colour you want changed. The save controls appear once there is something to save.

Colour added without inventing a scene

The opening operation does not search for a source colour. Every non-transparent pixel is included, its luminance stays where it was, and only its chromatic axes move to the selected target. That makes a real one-colour treatment for scans, engravings and black-and-white portraits rather than a wide tolerance pretending to select the whole frame.

Choose the target swatch and inspect the darkest and lightest regions. A strong chroma may clip at the edges of sRGB; the preview and export use the same gamut reduction, so the file is the result you approved.

What the operation cannot recover

  1. Original object colours are absent from a monochrome image and cannot be inferred by this arithmetic.
  2. One hue cannot independently colour skin, clothing and a background; that needs masks or a trained model.
  3. Colourising an already-colour image deliberately replaces all of its hues, so compare before saving.

Questions about the map

Does this restore the original colours?

No. A monochrome file contains lightness, not the hues that produced it. This maps one chosen colour across that lightness structure and makes no claim to historical reconstruction.

Why do the highlights stay pale?

The colour operation keeps each pixel's lightness. A near-white highlight therefore remains near white, while mid-tones carry most of the chosen chroma and shadows stay dark.

Can I make a duotone?

Yes. The Tone group turns the single tint into a ramp: two stops for a split tone (one colour on the shadows, another on the highlights, with a balance control) or three for a gradient map through the mid-tones. Strength blends the result with the original.

Other colour workflows