PhotosRevive For Mac

Photo colorization certainly isn’t new, as the technique has been around since the early 20th century, but the advent of colorization algorithms is making it accessible even to common folk like you and I. While the engines are far from perfect, you can often get great results with almost no effort.

PhotosRevive puts one of these colorization engines at your disposal, providing you with a remarkably straightforward method of modernizing your old photos or just adding some color to artistic shots. It works quite well, for the most part, and it even allows fine-tuning.

There are, by now, countless colorization engines available on the web, in various forms, from simple web apps to Reddit bots. Not all of them are equal, and the results are sometimes comical, but the technology is ever evolving.

Of course, nothing is ever going to come close to manual colorization, but that takes a lot of time and skill, which many of us don’t have in abundance.

We tested the app with a few of our own photos to try to emulate an actual user’s experience. We found that images with relatively little detail were handled quite well, but those with complex patterns gave the engine a bit of trouble.

You can make some simple image adjustments before saving the file, such as altering the contrast, brightness, shadows and highlights. These properties also affect the end result, so play around with them a bit.

Thankfully, the application does give you the option of applying some corrections to the colorized picture. Just click the image to add some indications, then change the blue, green, red and yellow ratios. Alternatively, you can pick a color from somewhere else in the image.

PhotosRevive is a cool app even if you have little interest in photo colorization, as it’s very fascinating to see how an algorithm can, usually, add the right colors to a black and white picture automatically. It gets it wrong sometimes, but it’s certainly worth a shot.