The past, in colour - honestly

Black & white photos, brought into colour.

Upload a black-and-white photo or scan. Get back a naturally colorized version - realistic skin tones, period-accurate colours for clothes, streets and skies, and light damage repair in the same pass. Faces stay exactly as they are.

Colorize a photo - $6 See the palettes

For family archives, anniversaries, local history projects and framed gifts.

Colour treatments

Same photo. Pick how the colour feels.

Leave it on Natural, or narrow the palette - each colorized version costs 10 credits, so ordering two looks and choosing is cheap.

Natural

As if shot on modern colour film.

Vintage Kodachrome

Soft muted colours, true to the era.

Warm golden

Gentle golden tones throughout.

Rich & vivid

Deeper saturation, still believable.

Soft pastel

Delicate, airy colour washes.

Before and after

Each pack below was generated exactly the way yours will be: a few casual source photos in, a finished set out. Nothing was retouched afterwards.

Before · source photos

Source photo of a grandfather and boy fishing, 1 of 1, taken on a phone

After · Phoxel

Phoxel result for a grandfather and boy fishing, 1 of 1, generated from the source photos

Why it lands

Colour turns "an old photo" into a person you recognize.

The past stops feeling distant.

Grey streets read as history; the same street in colour reads as a place you could walk down. Colorized family photos consistently get the strongest reaction of anything shared in a family chat.

Manual colorists charge $50+ per photo.

Hand-colorization is painstaking layer work, and prices reflect it. Here a colorized version costs a fraction of that and arrives in minutes - order two palettes and keep the better one.

Colour added, nothing else touched.

The composition, the faces, the clothes, the background - all locked to your photo. Colours are a plausible, period-aware interpretation, clearly better than grey and honest about being an interpretation.

Pricing

Buy credits. 10 credits = 1 colorized photo.

One print = one project, with 1–5 colorized versions to choose from. Credits work across every Phoxel niche. No subscription, no expiry. Sign up and get 20 free credits - your first 2 photos are on us.

Starter

200 credits · $0.30/photo

Up to 20 colorized photos
Five palettes to pick from
JPG download + ZIP

Get starter

Plus

$15

600 credits · $0.25/photo

A whole album section
Mix with restoration
Save 17% vs starter

Get popular

FAMILY PICK

Pro

$29

1500 credits · $0.19/photo

The full shoebox
Several palettes per photo
Use across other niches too
Save 36% vs starter

Get pro

Studio

$49

3000 credits · $0.16/photo

Whole-archive scale
History & genealogy projects
Save 46% vs starter

Get studio

FAQ

Colorization questions, sorted.

It doesn't know - it infers. Skin, foliage, sky and common materials colorize with high confidence; the colour of a specific dress or car is a historically plausible interpretation, not a documented fact. If you know the real colours, order a couple of versions and pick the truest one.

Yes - the photo's composition, faces, expressions and every detail are locked to the original. Only colour is added (plus light damage repair). Nothing and nobody is redrawn or beautified.

No - colorization gently repairs damage along the way: scratches, dust, stains and fading are corrected in the same pass. If the print is heavily damaged but you want it kept black-and-white, use the photo restoration niche instead.

No. A phone photo of the print works: shoot it straight-on in even light without glare, with the whole photo in the frame. A scan works even better if you have one.

Yes - sepia and other single-tone prints colorize the same way black-and-white ones do.

No. Buy a pack and use it whenever - credits sit in your account until you spend them, across any niche.

See them the way they saw each other.

One phone photo of the print, a few minutes, $6 to start. The family chat won't stay quiet.

Colorize a photo - $6 Just repairs? Restore it