Portrait UnionColour on a photograph that never had any
A black-and-white print has been looked at a thousand times in grey. Nobody in the family has ever seen the dress, the garden or the colour of the light that afternoon. Colourisation is how you show them.
Portrait Union colourises an old photograph from a scan or a phone photo of the print. An image model repairs the print and returns the scene in colour in one pass, at the photograph’s own proportions. The preview is free and watermarked, the finished file is €4.99, and a gallery canvas starts at €69.99 with shipping included.
Nothing is charged until you have seen the result, and there is no account to make.
The colour is an interpretation, and that is the honest word for it
A black-and-white negative recorded brightness. It did not record hue, and no amount of processing can read out of a photograph something the film never wrote down. So a colourisation is not a recovery of the colours that were in the room; it is a reading of the photograph by something that has seen a great many photographs, and it is right in the way a well-informed guess is right.
We would rather you knew that before you looked than felt it afterwards. It changes what the picture is for. A colourised portrait is not evidence of what your grandmother wore on her wedding day — it is the first time anyone in the family gets to see her as a person in a coloured world rather than as a figure in an archive. That is worth a great deal, and it is worth more when nobody has been told it is something else.
What the colour is reasoned from
Some of it is barely a guess at all. Skin, hair, foliage, sky, brick, wood and daylight fall into narrow ranges, and the tonal values in the original constrain them further: a dark grey in a face and a dark grey in a hedge are not the same dark grey, and the restoration treats them differently because it recognises what it is looking at.
The rest genuinely is a guess, and the page that pretends otherwise is lying to you. The colour of a dress, a painted wall, a car, a uniform or a bunch of flowers is not recoverable from a monochrome photograph. What the restoration does there is choose something plausible for the period and keep it quiet — muted, believable, no modern colour grading — so that the parts it could not know sit behind the parts it could, rather than shouting over them.
If you know the real colour of something and it matters to you, the restraint is on your side: a muted guess is easy to live with and easy to correct later in any photo editor, where a confident wrong one would have to be undone first.
The face does not change when the colour arrives
This is the real fear about colourisation, and it is not unreasonable — most people have seen a colourised portrait where a tired, ordinary, beloved face came back rested, smooth and about fifteen years younger, wearing lipstick nobody in the family remembers.
The restoration is instructed against every part of that. Nothing is beautified: no makeup, no skin smoothing, no de-ageing, no slimming, no correcting of a crooked feature into symmetry. Wrinkles, pores, freckles, scars and the natural asymmetry of a real face are the things it is told to protect, because they are what make the photograph a photograph of somebody in particular. Photographic grain and the softness of the period stay too; only distracting noise is reduced.
Where the damage hides something, the restoration blends from what survives next to it and leaves the uncertain part softly unresolved. It does not guess a feature back into existence, and a faithful result that is slightly soft is the one worth keeping.
Every restoration comes back in colour
There is one restoration on this site and it always colourises. The repair and the colouring happen together in a single pass, so there is no monochrome option to choose and no version of this that cleans a print and leaves it grey. A neutral black-and-white print, a sepia-toned one and a colour photograph that has faded to orange all go through the same door.
Worth knowing if colour is not what you came for: the result is a new file, and the photograph you uploaded is still yours, unchanged, in whatever form you had it. If what you need is the damage dealt with, the same upload does that as well — that side of it is on repairing a damaged photograph.
What arrives, and what it costs
Upload the print and, in about a minute, you see one restored preview at up to 400 px with a watermark. That preview is free — one per visitor per day — and it needs no account. The private link to it closes 48 hours after upload.
The free preview is watermarked and up to 400 px on the long edge. Your watermark-free restoration is delivered at the resolution the restoration model produces, about 4 megapixels, and is enlarged separately for canvas prints; the exact download dimensions and any restoration crop are shown beside your preview before payment. Only print sizes that keep the combined restoration and print crop within 6.5% of the original upload are offered. Pixel dimensions do not guarantee newly recovered detail.
The watermark-free file is €4.99. A colourised photograph keeps its own proportions rather than being squared into a portrait shape, so the upright, landscape and square print sizes that fit it are offered beside the preview; a gallery canvas starts at €69.99 with shipping and the digital file included. The full table is on pricing.
There is a worked example — a creased studio print from the nineteen-fifties, before and after — on the restoration page, which is also where the upload box lives.
Questions about colourising
Can I say what colour the dress was?
No, and it is worth being plain about it: there is no box to type that into and nothing in the upload carries it. The colour is decided entirely from the photograph. What you get instead is the free watermarked preview before any money is involved, so the judgement is yours rather than a promise of ours.
Can I have the photograph back in black and white too?
The restoration always returns colour — there is no monochrome setting, because the repair and the colouring are one pass rather than two. Your own original is untouched, so the black-and-white photograph you uploaded is still the black-and-white photograph you have.
Will the skin look painted or plastic?
That is the failure everyone has seen, and it is what the restoration is instructed against: grain and period softness are kept, skin is not smoothed, and there is no clarity or HDR finish. The colour is deliberately muted rather than saturated. A quiet result is also the one that still looks right on a wall in ten years.
Is a faded colour photograph a different job?
It is the same upload and the same pass, but the colour is doing something different. A faded colour print still holds its own dyes, weakened, so the work is bringing back what is there. A black-and-white print never held any, so the colour is reasoned onto it. Both come back through the same page.
See it in colour first, decide afterwards
The preview costs nothing and there is nothing to cancel later. If the colour is not believable, you have lost a minute.
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