Put faces to the names on your tree
You've traced the line back six generations, but the tree is mostly text. The few pictures you have are tiny tintypes, cabinet cards, or a newspaper clipping where great-great-grandfather is a gray smudge. Distant cousins keep sending phone pictures of pictures. You want each ancestor to have a clear face on their profile, and a version in color that helps younger relatives see them as people rather than records.
Black-and-White Colorizer adds period-plausible color to an old portrait: uniforms, dresses, skin tone and hair, while keeping the features as the print shows them. Run Old Photo Restorer first when a picture has foxing or cracks, then colorize the repaired version. Image Upscaler brings a thumbnail-sized clipping up to a face you can actually see. Upload every result to your tree software alongside the untouched original.
Made in the Studio with the first tool on the route.
You want
- A tintype the size of a postage stamp is the only picture of my great-great-grandmother.
- The tree has sixty names and eleven faces.
- Cousins send me phone pictures of pictures with a lamp reflected in the glass.
- Color would help the kids see these people as more than a date range.
The route
- 1Colorize an ancestor's portrait
Adds plausible color to clothing, skin and setting while keeping the face as recorded in the print.
Black-and-White Colorizer - 2Repair foxing, cracks and fading first
A clean repair before colorizing avoids painting color over damage.
Old Photo Restorer - 3Upscale tiny clippings so the face is readable
Takes a thumbnail-sized image up to a size where features can be compared across records.
Image Upscaler
Good to know
- Which tool should I run first on a damaged old photo?
- Old Photo Restorer, then Black-and-White Colorizer. Repairing first means the color goes onto a clean picture instead of over the cracks. If the picture is also very small, upscale it last, once the restoration and color are done, so the enlargement sharpens the finished version rather than the damage.
- Will the colors be historically accurate?
- They're plausible, not documented. The tool picks likely colors for skin, fabric and surroundings from the tones in the print; a uniform may come out the right shade or not. Treat the colorized version as an aid to seeing the person, keep the original as the record, and note in your tree that the color was added.
- Is it okay to share colorized pictures with other researchers?
- Yes, and it's common courtesy to say they're colorized. Download at full resolution, name the file with the ancestor and the date, and attach the original scan too. Other researchers can then judge the source themselves. Your uploads and results are yours to keep, share or delete.
Tools on this route