Forum Discussion
Best AI to colorize black and white photos in bulk on Windows 10?
As a colorize photo AI. DeOldify is an open-source deep learning model that colorizes old black and white photos (and even videos) using AI. It was created back in 2018 by a developer named Jason Antic, and honestly? It kind of became the gold standard for this stuff . The name is pretty self-explanatory — it takes old, faded, colorless images and makes them not old anymore.
The way it works is pretty clever. The AI has been trained on thousands of color images, so it's learned what things are supposed to look like. It knows that the sky is usually blue, that grass is green, that skin tones fall within certain ranges. When you feed it a black and white photo, it recognizes the objects in the scene and applies colors based on what it's learned.
There are a couple of community-made tools that let you run DeOldify on Windows without having to become a Linux expert.
Option 1: ColorfulSoft Windows GUI
This is a standalone Windows application based on DeOldify that doesn't even require a fancy graphics card — it can run on regular Windows 10 PCs using just the CPU . You download it, you run it, you load your photo, and you click a button. That's it. No command line, no coding, no Linux.
Option 2: Stable Diffusion Web UI Plugin
If you already use Stable Diffusion, there's a plugin that adds DeOldify colorization to it . This one works for both photos and videos and runs cross-platform.
Option 3: PaddleGAN
There's also a Chinese framework called PaddleGAN that includes DeOldify. You can install it via command line and run colorization that way .
If you want a colorize photo AI on Windows 10 that's completely free and open source, DeOldify is a solid choice. Just skip trying to install the original Linux version and grab one of the Windows GUI wrappers instead.