Can you add color to a black-and-white photograph?

Not here. Coloring a monochrome print is a different job with a different risk — every color in it would be a guess about a person we never met. We repair the damage and leave the photograph the kind of photograph it is.

It is faded and stained. Which page do I use?

Either. The repair looks at the whole photograph, and one tap only tells us which problem to lead with. A print with fading and water damage is repaired for both in the same pass.

Will the colors be the real ones?

They will be plausible and muted rather than certain. Where the cyan dye is gone entirely, its exact value is not recoverable, so we aim for the tones the film and paper of that era actually produced.

Repair a faded photograph

Fading is not one thing either. A color print from the seventies fades unevenly — the cyan dye goes first, which is why the whole photograph drifts orange and the shadows drift red. A black-and-white print does not lose color it never had; it loses contrast, and the paper yellows around it.

Sunlight does most of it. A photograph that hung on a wall facing a window for thirty years has had thirty years of it, and the part behind the mount usually proves it.

The repair is a judgement, not a slider. Skin has to come back as skin rather than as a suntan, and a photograph from 1968 has to look like 1968.

Repair one photograph, free What a pack costs

What fills a gap in a damaged photograph is our best guess, not what was there.

A color photograph of two dogs behind a lattice screen door, stained and shifted to magenta — A magenta cast over two dogs behind a screen door. The cast is gone, but so is the rest of the color: this one came back black and white, which is a loss and not a repair.

The same photograph returned in black and white, the magenta cast and the remaining color both gone — A magenta cast over two dogs behind a screen door. The cast is gone, but so is the rest of the color: this one came back black and white, which is a loss and not a repair.

What comes back

The orange and magenta shift of a faded color print, corrected to muted, period-plausible tones.
The yellow of an old black-and-white print, and the flat gray where its blacks used to be.
Density and contrast across the whole photograph, from real black in the shadows to clean white in the highlights.
The hard line where a mount or a frame protected part of the print and the rest kept fading.

What does not come back

Color that was never recorded. A black-and-white photograph stays black and white here — we do not add color to one, and nothing we do turns a monochrome print into a color one.
Detail that faded past recovery. Where a highlight has gone to blank paper there is nothing left in it to read, and what the repair puts back there is drawn rather than uncovered.
Making it look modern. The point is the photograph as it was taken, not the photograph as a phone would have taken it.

What fills a gap in a damaged photograph is our best guess, not what was there.

Three of these, repaired

A color photograph of a beach and a large tank, everything faded to an overall pink — Faded through to pink, sky and sand together. The color comes back without the lettering on the tank losing a letter.

The same photograph with the sky blue and the sand natural again, the warning lettering intact — Faded through to pink, sky and sand together. The color comes back without the lettering on the tank losing a letter.

A yellowed black-and-white portrait with almost no contrast left — Black-and-white, gone the color of tea. It comes back as black and white, because that is what it is.

The same portrait with its blacks and whites recovered, still monochrome — Black-and-white, gone the color of tea. It comes back as black and white, because that is what it is.

Why it faded, and how to stop the rest

Light, heat and damp, in that order. The photographs still in the box are usually the ones worth acting on now, and negatives and slides fade in the same way for the same reasons while being far easier to store well. The guide below is what to do with them.

How to store negatives and slides

Questions about this kind of damage

Can you add color to a black-and-white photograph?: Not here. Coloring a monochrome print is a different job with a different risk — every color in it would be a guess about a person we never met. We repair the damage and leave the photograph the kind of photograph it is.
It is faded and stained. Which page do I use?: Either. The repair looks at the whole photograph, and one tap only tells us which problem to lead with. A print with fading and water damage is repaired for both in the same pass.
Will the colors be the real ones?: They will be plausible and muted rather than certain. Where the cyan dye is gone entirely, its exact value is not recoverable, so we aim for the tones the film and paper of that era actually produced.

Try it on yours

One photograph, repaired, free, with no card. Send this exact kind of damage and see what comes back before you spend anything.

Repair one photograph, free

If it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.

Other kinds of damage