Photo restoration used to be an art form reserved for masters with paintbrushes or, later, Photoshop experts who spent hours on a single layer. Today, it is a computational science. But as professional restorers know, not all tools are fit for professional work.
The market is flooded with "One-Click Magic" apps that compress your images, strip your metadata, and return a low-res result. For the serious archivist or historian, Local AI processing is the only viable path forward.
How AI "Hallucinates" Color
The term "hallucination" in AI is often negative, but in colorization, it's the goal. The AI must hallucinate (predict) color where none exists. It does this by analyzing Luminance Channels.
An image is made of pixels. In a B&W photo, each pixel has a value from 0 (Black) to 255 (White). The AI's job is to assign two missing values to that pixel: Hue (the color) and Saturation (the intensity). It does this by looking at context. A texture that looks like "Denim" (scruffy, cross-hatch pattern) at the bottom of an image is assigned "Blue."
The Problem with Cloud Compression
When you use a generic online tool, you are at the mercy of their server costs. To save bandwidth, they often:
- Downscale your 4000px scan to 800px.
- Apply aggressive JPEG compression, introducing artifacts.
- Strip EXIF data (Date Taken, Camera Model).
Our Client-Side Colorizer avoids this entirely. Because the processing happens on your device, we don't need to save bandwidth. We process the full-resolution image you provide.
Metadata Preservation
For historians, metadata is gold. Knowing the scan date, the original filename, and the scanner model is part of the provenance. Most cloud tools wipe this clean. Ours preserves it (unless you use our Metadata Stripper to deliberately remove it).
Batch Processing & Workflow
Professionals don't do one photo. They do 50. Client-side tools excel here. There is no "Upload... Wait... Download" loop. You can queue up a folder of images and process them as fast as your GPU allows.
The Future: Interactive Color Guidance
Current AI is "automatic," but the future is "assisted." Soon, you will be able to give the AI a hint: "This dress was red." Our research team is actively working on integrating these text-to-image prompts directly into our web tool.
Conclusion
Science meets Art in restoration. By choosing tools that respect the integrity of the digital file—keeping it local, uncompressed, and private—you ensure that your work stands the test of time.