Colorize Image

This tints a photo. It does not colourise a black-and-white one.

Worth clearing up first, because the two get confused and they are opposite operations.

Tinting — what this does — takes the brightness information in your image and pushes it towards a single colour. A sepia tint makes everything brown-toned: light areas become cream, dark areas become deep brown. The result is a one-colour image, which is the point.

Colourising is the reverse and much harder: taking a black-and-white photograph and working out that the sky was blue, the grass green and the coat red, then painting those colours in. That needs a model trained on millions of photographs to guess what colour things were, and it is a genuinely different technology.

So if you have an old family photograph and you want to see it in colour, this is not the tool — you want an AI colourisation service, and there are several good ones. What this will do is give that photograph a warm sepia tone, which is the classic period look and often more attractive than a speculative colour version.

The strength slider is the whole point

Almost every sepia tool online is a single button: click, and your photo is fully sepia. That is why so many sepia photos look the same and slightly cheap.

Here the strength runs from 10 to 100 per cent, defaulting to 80. What it controls is how much of the original colour survives.

At 100% the image is fully toned — a true single-colour photograph, no original colour left. This is the right setting for a deliberate period effect, or for unifying a set of images shot in different conditions.

Around 70 to 85% — the default range — gives you a strong tone with a trace of the original colour underneath. It reads as a warm, aged photograph rather than a filter, and it is where most photographs look best.

Around 30 to 50% is a subtle warm grade. The photo still looks like a colour photograph, just warmer and softer. This is what you want for a website header, a product shot or anything where the effect should not announce itself.

Below 25% is barely perceptible, which is occasionally exactly right for taking the clinical edge off a photograph.

The useful habit: start higher than you want and come down. It is easier to see where the effect becomes too much and then back off than to creep up on it.

Any colour, not just sepia

The hue control opens the full colour wheel, which turns a sepia tool into a general toning tool. A few settings worth knowing:

Around 30 — the default — is the classic sepia-to-amber range, warm and photographic.

Around 200 to 220 gives a cool blue tone. This is the other classic monochrome treatment: cyanotype, moonlight, cold and slightly melancholy. It suits architecture, winter scenes and night photography.

Around 120 is green — unusual, and effective for anything meant to feel synthetic, clinical or unsettling.

Around 350 is a rose tint, which flatters skin and suits portraits and food.

The practical use for the hue wheel is matching a brand colour. Tint a set of photographs towards your brand's hue at a low strength and a mismatched collection of images suddenly looks like it belongs together — which is a trick used constantly in design and almost never explained.

Where a tint actually earns its place

Unifying a set of images. The strongest practical use. Photos shot on different cameras, at different times of day, under mixed lighting look like a mess together. Tint them all the same way and the inconsistency largely disappears, because the tone overrides the colour differences.

Making text readable over a photo. A tinted image at moderate strength is calmer than a full-colour one, so white or dark text sits on it far more legibly. This is why so many website headers are toned.

A period or archival look, where sepia carries an immediate association with age.

Taking the edge off a bad photo. A picture with unpleasant colour — greenish office lighting, an orange cast from a lamp, mismatched white balance — often looks considerably better toned than corrected, because a deliberate single tone reads as a choice while a colour cast reads as a mistake.

If you want to remove colour entirely rather than replace it, Convert Image to Grayscale does that with a choice of conversion method, and its page explains why the method matters more than you would expect.

Practical notes

The preview updates as you move the sliders, so you can see the effect at each setting rather than converting to find out.

The output is a JPEG, which suits photographs. A transparent PNG will come back with its transparency filled, so if you need transparency preserved this is not the right step in your workflow.

A tint is applied to the whole image and cannot be confined to part of it. And it is not reversible — the toned file has lost the original colour information, so keep your original if you might want it back.

Everything runs on your own device: no upload, no watermark, no account and no limit.

Related tools

Convert Image to Grayscale removes colour entirely, with three conversion methods and a contrast control. Sharpen Image adds definition, which a toned image often benefits from. Make Round Image crops to a circle or a rounded square, which pairs well with a tinted portrait.