Oh i forgot to mention with this type of software, if you have black and white photos you are going to restore and color, scratches in photos or bits that are out of focus, Use photoshop or other types
of software to fix the faults in the photos First, as you will regret it otherwise, as i thought it would be easier once colored, but found it Harder on Most photos.

Mark

Downloaded and installed ok on XP with SP3,
This software is VERY Basic, it gets the job done but lacks a good
toolbar selection and should have more colors choices as preset colors, a color picker tool would be good to add as you could pick
colors from other colored photos to use on your own, mainly good on
skin tones.
Like any program you have to keep saving your progress as you work,
but i find this has to be done way to often, with this software, as one slight mistake without saving and its almost time to start from scratch again, erase tool/undo is a little bit confusing for most people, as for #16 Yes i have used Recolored and its far better than Photo Colorizer 2.0, even at twice the price. i don`t know of any Free alternatives. But check out Recolored and compare to this one.

http://www.recolored.com/

Mark

Awesome. It installed well on XP, no errors. In minutes I had colorized an old photo. I wish there was an undo button but you can either erase and color over or start from previously saved version. For $14.99 it is not bad at all. I would recommend it.

Good little program for someone with alot of patience. It is not a very user friendly interface which i think is why it recieved so many bad reviews. It installed & ran fine on my Win 7 Ultimate 64bit & Vista Ultimate 64bit, however it crashed twice on my XP Pro 32bit but after reinstalling it, it was fine. It needs to have selection tools to make it easier. Thanks but I will stick to Microsoft Picture-It! 9 for this kind of stuff for now.

All I can say is that I tried this software right away, and did not like it at all. I liked the idea as I have a couple old photos that are B&W but this was just not the program to try and colorize them with. Maybe if you wanted to spend several hours on just one photo. Again a very good idea but needs some major rework and fine tuning.

Well I think it does a pretty good job if you persevere with it.

Here's a before and after American Civil War photgraph I did today:

http://i389.photobucket.com/albums/oo335/clpxm39/CWN88unmarked/artillery-civil-war-001.jpg

http://i389.photobucket.com/albums/oo335/clpxm39/CWN88unmarked/artillery-civil-war-colourized.jpg

CADKAS have good ideas on software, but their solutions lacks usability.

as good germans they doesnt like much the feedback (read on the web their responses to users)

anyway thanks for the GA.

It's a good thing I don't rely on comments alone because most of you got it wrong! There are many brush sizes (radius +/-), also millions of colors. The zoom is very helpful for detail. After ERACE, click on COLORIZE to continue. 11 save options. NO crashes or freeze-ups. I've been waiting for a small app like this to do exactly what this does. (W7)
Thanks to CAD-KAS Kassler Computersoftware GbR & GOTD. It's a keeper.

For those who wish to adjust the 2 skin tones to lighter values just increase the brightness UP (say 80%) for those who want it darker reduce brighness to your prefered shade for fine tuning also adjust the saturation up or down.

The problem with adjusting brightness is there is no fine upper/lower threshold so depending on neighbouring pixel saturation they can be whitewashed or blackened
[Developer to note threshold sliders for upper and lower thresholding would be essential in next version]

The lack of an undo button with stepping back is a limitation but the trick is to switch between the two modes Colourise (yes i'm Irish)and Erase which should be labled "Restore area" so that you can adjust the Hue (Colour) and Saturation per area and try again
[Developer to note those hue and sat scroll boxes would be better placed alongside the colour picker]

The sigle brush (variable circle) is better than a rectangle for random or natural shapes
[Developer to note it would be nice to have a variable pippet size to say say which tones are to be included and those to define exclusion zone around the perimiter]

By the way, in order to undo, you have to use the "erase" tool. It erases one bit at a time. It is kind of annoying, but it is slightly better than starting over.

Found it to be excellent as you can use erase if u make a mistake and can also fine tune the colors. Have just done some and am very pleased. If u enlarge the image it makes it much easier.
Thanks to company and GAOTD.

Photo Colorizer is a small, portable app [~1.5MB in just 4 files if you delete the text/junk], designed to let you tint images. There are 3 buttons -- "Grayscale", "Soften", & "Colorize Everything" -- but otherwise you have your choice of painting on your tint or erasing it... erasing removes all effects, reverting to the original image. The brush is a basic circle (no feathering, anti-aliasing etc) which is responsive enough if you keep the radius down around 10 or so (increasing it introduces lag). There are 2 boxes -- 1 for brush radius & 1 for zooming in/out -- & once you zoom in you notice the usual capability to drag the image is missing [you have to rely on the scroll bars]. While there are 9 tint presets, you've got a color mixer on the right side of the window so you can use any color. Photo Colorizer uses a Hue, Saturation, Color model rather than the RGB colorspace most are used to. You can save your altered image in a fair variety of formats, but not .png.

Maybe someone else will come up with a use or need for today's GOTD, but personally I'm at a bit of a loss on Photo Colorizer's intended audience or market... If you have old B&W photos you have to scan them 1st obviously, and if you've got a scanner it very likely came with the better software you'd need to fix the rest of the photo -- every one I've restored had some sort of damage because of it's age. You can find B&W images on-line -- plenty of them -- but there are tons more in color, so why choose a B&W photo to begin with?

This program is very basic for the job description, the lack of undo/redo is a major flaw for a program of this sort IMO. I have colorized many old black and white pictures (taken by an uncle who was a very keen photographer in the 50's through to 70's)using a program called Recolored, it really does a good job, albeit a bit more expensive than this offering, but it does have a lot more options, including undo/redo and of course Photoshop will do the job as well, but takes a little more time.
I'm afraid that for the moment this is a non-starter for me, but perhaps in time with appropiate additions and features this may become a worthwhile piece of software for photographers and graphic artists.

Installed fine but running this program was a challenge very complicated to get the correct color tone ended looking like a 3d colored cartoon. Program ran very choppy with my quad core system. I had to save a lot our you will lose the whole project. and it kept freezing when saving. I ended up uninstalling after a few tries. Even that part was a pain. Wasn't worth the hassle with minimal results. I don't write many reviews but this was a thumbs down.

For Undo,click on Erase and next click on your photo.It must to work on colours(are unnaturals,your skin is like you eat only carrots.

Gets the job done, but in a pathetic way. Only one tool (you can change the size, draw the chosen color and erase it), no undo, very slow. Predefined colors don't match real world colors...

For those that have Photoshop, stick with it, works better. For those that don't give this a try, but you wont really be happy with it. Not at all worth $14.99.

Not that great but still useful for simple pictures

Downloaded and installed very quickly & smoothly on XP3. Despite remainders of German Language this offering has a very short learning curve because it doesn't have that many options.

What it does do it seems to do well but be sure not to import a large photo - It will hang.

It comes with ten preset colours. I would have liked the opportunity of adding more (Or changing and renaming the existing)

I have enjoyed colouring in an old street scene using the presets but it looked a bit 'Kiddy Crayon' in colour so you need to tweak the set colours. It only offers a round brush and the centre of the brush NEEDS to be on the photo. (Bit awkward for colouring in extreme edges).
The biggest neg with this prog is that there is NO UNDO FUNCTION!

This is a terible ommission for a program of this type.

Also, you also cannot alter the shape of the brush for straight sides. The brush sizes increment in 10's so you need to physically type in different brush sizes between those given.

A nice and very interesting addition is the ability to 'Colorize' everything. you can then use the erase function to uncolorise the building, person or which ever subject(s) you choose.
I recommend everyone tries this feature as for that alone this program is a keeper albeit a bit clumsy to use. Try lowering the brighness well into the minuses and then use erase to expose an object. Leave the object as original or go on to re- colour the object. Very nice effect.

Program saves files OK but interestingly original size was reduced. Seems to keep the quality of photo intact tho but then I have to wear glasses.

Any pic can be turned into greyscale and the program also has a 'Soften' effect which is quite subtle and very useful.

A keeper for me as it lends itself to many interesting uses and I don't have a feature on any of my photo manipulating software, that does what this does.

I recommend you try it and spend 20 minutes playing with it before deciding if this is for you.

Thanks to the developers and to GAOTD for this.

For a program with only one use expected efficiency with more functions, on a large photo 4mb the colouring lags cursor movement so you have to wait every few seconds for the program to catch up with the cursor, increasing the cursor size makes it much worse, with smaller picture 200kb lag is reduced but still annoying, increase cursor to 100 still gives approx 20 second delay and CPU usage goes up from 3% to 25%.
No way to mask areas.
No reliable indication of what colour is selected.
No undo function.
The soften button affects the whole photo not just the colour so whole photo is blurred.
No way to lighten areas.


Software was installed on a 2 month old PC with quad processor 2Tb hard drive and 8Gb Ram running Windows 7 64bit that will happily run Adobe Photoshop, FireFox, Word 2010, Coral VideoStudio Pro and other programs all at the same time without any problems.
I have been able to get much better results from basic photo software given away with digital camera so unfortunately will be uninstalling Photo-Colorizer

I didn't realize it was April already; this is a joke, right?? I completely agree with vilulf. This seems to be some kind of primitive paint program, but it's pretty hard to stay between the lines when you only have a round brush. Is there hair hanging down over someone's forehead in the photo? No problem, just paint right over it with your skin colored brush. Is there sky showing through the bare branches of a tree? Just leave it gray; no one will notice. There really needs to be some type of magic wand for selecting entire areas that have natural boundaries in the photo, and then being able to fill that area with a color. The manual and demo mpg on the website were not helpful at all with regard to how you are supposed to use this program.

Clicking on "Erase" allows you to pseudo undo

I have a nice fast computer (Alienware with an Overclocked Intel i7 980x Extreme Six Core Processor)and I must say, running this program made me feel like I was in the stone age... Very slow program, cant seem to keep up with the movements on my wacom drawing tablet. It freezes and takes too much time catching up. Not to mention the other many errors such as no undo and so forth. On a photo editing software who ever heard of not having an undo feature??? Completly ludicrous... This program looks and runs like something my 6 year old son designed... Not something I would recomend

I have been looking for a software like this, but PC2.0 is just a bit too simple. Instead of making it a stand-alone program it had been better given away as an 8bf filter or plug-in for use in a good graphics editor.

To make it usable (not perfect) it should at least have:
undo tool
lasso tool
magic wand tool
masks and layers

but like I said, publishing it as a 8bf filter would take care of this....

and of course we need more predefined (skin) colours...

Okay, I gave it a try....

I am absolutely unimpressed with this software.

The first thing that I noticed is that there is mixed language
in the controls, English, Geman.

This made me wonder just how little time went into creating this program, if the developer can't even stick with one uniform language.

Secondly, I could do a better job "colorizing" a black & white photo with a box of Crayola Crayons and some colored felt markers.

on the bright side, if you want a program that's great at geyscaling an existing color photo, this software does a good job of that.
but that's about it.

I saw presets for " skin1 & skin2 " coloring schemes........
however, I don't know any orange humans so they seem pretty much useless....
And I saw no support for darker skinned people, or reddish skinned people, or caucasion skinned people.

thumbs down from this reviewer,
uninstalling

Addition to comment 1. When trying to close the program it pops up program is not responding with the option to end now. This program definately deserves thumbs down in my opinion. I have many photo editing softwares including photoshop CS4 and NONE of them run as terrible as this one.

Very slow interface. Wants to freez up. Running on XP SP3.

sweeeeeeet
what I always wanted =)

Rubbish. No undo, if you make a single mistake you have to start from last save. If you paint in the wrong place, you have to restart from last save. The skin colours are awful. This program is unusable for its purpose. Its a good idea, and I was looking forward to it, but very disappointed.