Restore Black and White Photos With AI

Restoration vs. Colorization — What's the Difference?

This is important to understand before you upload. Magic Memory restores black and white photos — it makes them sharper, clearer, and more detailed. It does not colorize them.

Colorization is a separate AI process that adds artificial color to a B&W photo. It produces dramatic results but is interpretive — the AI guesses what colors things would have been. If you want colorization specifically, tools like MyHeritage InColor or DeOldify handle that.

If you want your B&W photos to look clearer and sharper while staying B&W — that is what Magic Memory does, and it does it well.

What GFPGAN Does to B&W Portraits

GFPGAN was trained on millions of high-resolution faces. When it processes a black and white photo, it identifies facial structures — eyes, nose, mouth, hairline — and reconstructs the fine detail that film grain and low resolution obscured.

The result: your ancestor's face goes from a soft, grainy blur to a sharp portrait where you can see expression, individual hairs, and the fine wrinkles that make a face a person.