Selective Colorization
Turn a photo black and white, then paint the color back exactly where you want it. Free and online.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Turn a photo black and white, then paint the color back exactly where you want it. Free and online.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Paint over the picture to bring its color back.
Drop a photo on the page and it turns black and white. Then paint over the parts you want in color - a red umbrella in a grey street, the flowers in a bouquet, a child's yellow raincoat, one car in a row of parked ones - and their original color comes back under the brush while everything else stays monochrome. That is selective color - selective coloring, or selective colour and colouring in British spelling - the photography effect also called color splash or color isolation, and done with a brush it goes exactly where you want it: the whole subject, part of it, or several things at once.
The color that comes back is the photo's own, never a tint laid on top, so skin looks like skin and a sky keeps its gradient. The edge of the brush is soft, so a stroke blends into the grey around it instead of leaving a hard cut-out line.
Shortcuts on a keyboard: X switches between Color and Gray, [ and ] make the brush smaller and bigger, R starts over.
If the whole picture should be black and white, the grayscale converter does it in one step and offers several ways to turn color into grey, and the black and white converter makes a punchier classic look or pure black and white. This page is for the picture that is black and white EXCEPT for something - the selective colorization look. The grey here is luminance, the brightness your eye sees in each color, so the monochrome parts keep the contrast of the original.
To change a color rather than keep it, the color changer swaps one color in an image for another.
Your strokes are recorded, not baked into the preview. When you download, every stroke is painted again at the full resolution of the photo, so a 12 or 24 megapixel picture comes out with clean, smooth brush edges rather than a blown-up copy of the smaller preview. The download is the same size as the photo you opened, and a PNG with transparency keeps it: see-through parts stay see-through in both the grey and the colored areas.
Selective color is often done on the photos that matter most - a wedding, a new baby, a family portrait. They stay yours: the photo is opened, painted and saved entirely in your browser and is never uploaded anywhere.
Paint over the thing in that color with the Color brush. The rest of the picture stays black and white. Because it is a brush and not an automatic color pick, other objects that happen to share the color stay grey unless you paint them too.
Yes. Switch the brush to Gray and paint over the spill, or use undo to take back whole strokes one at a time.
No. The color comes from the photo itself, so the picture you open needs to be in color. An old black and white photo has no color to bring back.
Yes, paint with your finger. Open the picture fullscreen for fine edges, and use a larger brush for big areas first.
No. Everything happens in your browser, and the photo never leaves your device.