80 Historical Photographs That Got A Complete Makeover After Someone Added Color

Turns out colorizing old photographs is a much older art than most people realize, and it did not start with a computer. Back in the 1840s, when daguerreotypes and tintypes were the only game in town, studio artists were already dabbing tiny brushes loaded with powdered pigments onto portraits, adding a pink flush to cheeks or a soft blue to a dress.

This was known as hand coloring and it was widespread before color film ever existed. For families who wanted something more lifelike than gray tones, this was often the only option available, and it stayed popular well into the twentieth century through photo studios that offered hand tinted portraits as a standard service.

That approach eventually evolved into oil based tinting, where colorists used transparent dyes on glossy prints, then it evolved again once digital tools entered the picture. When Photoshop showed up in 1991, artists realized the same layering logic from analog tinting could be recreated with color layers, brushes, and adjustments like hue and saturation.

Suddenly a colorist could tweak an image endlessly without ruining the original print. This digital shift made the whole process faster and far more forgiving, though it still relied entirely on a human eye and a whole lot of patience. The real game changer showed up more recently, and it came from artificial intelligence rather than an artist's steady hand.

Neural networks trained on millions of color photographs learned to recognize patterns the same way a person would, picking out skin, foliage, fabric, sky, and countless other textures, then predicting what colors those elements probably had.

In simple terms, one part of the system tries to add believable color while another part critiques the result, and the two go back and forth until the output looks convincing. It is a strange little rivalry happening entirely inside a computer, and it is responsible for a lot of the colorized photos floating around the internet today.

Here is the part that might surprise you though. Even with all that computing power, AI colorization is still mostly educated guesswork. A neural network has no idea what color a specific soldier's uniform actually was or what shade of red a particular vintage car came in. It only knows what colors tend to show up in similar looking objects across its training data.