You get the real result, not a blurry preview.Free means the full-size restored photo — the same file a paid tool would sell you.
By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: August 2026
"Free" means five different things in this corner of the internet: free to try, free with a watermark, free if you make an account, free at low resolution, or actually free. We opened seven old-photo tools and wrote down which one each of them is. PicReviver is ours — everything else comes off their own pricing page, dated so you can check it.
Restore a photo now →Read off each tool's own pricing or product page on 6 August 2026. Prices move; the date is there so you can tell how stale this is.
| Tool | Free version | Account? | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| PicReviver | Yes, no watermark, no cap (99 MB / 45 MP per photo) | No | Colorize, restore, sharpen, upscale |
| Palette.fm | Free result is watermarked and 500×500 px; paid from ~$6/mo or ~$0.15 per image | Yes | Colorize, 21+ filters |
| MyHeritage In Color | Free to try, subscription for more | Yes | Colorize, enhance, animate |
| Hotpot.ai | Pay per image, ~$0.02-$0.25 | Yes | Colorize, restore |
| Kolorize | Limited free allowance | Yes | Colorize photo and video |
| Upscayl | Fully free, open source | No | Upscale only, installed app |
| Waifu2x | Fully free | No | Upscale and denoise, best on drawings |
These tools are not interchangeable — the right one depends on what is wrong with the picture:
Three things separate "free" from free in this category, and none of them are visible until you have already uploaded your photo:
Colour from an AI is a plausible guess, not a record — that holds for every tool on this list, ours included. It is reliable for skin, sky and greenery and unreliable for a specific shade, like the colour of a uniform or a car. If the exact colour matters historically, treat the result as an illustration, not evidence.
We opened every tool's own site on 6 August 2026 and copied what it published about price and sign-up. We did not run the same photo through all seven and rank the output — image quality in this category depends heavily on the source scan, and a single test photo would make a comparison look more scientific than it is. So this page compares what each tool costs and demands, not whose colours are prettiest.
PicReviver runs its models on our own GPUs in the Netherlands, which is why it can skip the credits and the account. Uploads are deleted right after processing; the compress, resize and crop tools never upload at all.
Yes — colorize, restore, sharpen and upscale are free, with no account and no watermark on the download, at the photo's own resolution up to 45 megapixels.
Upscayl, which you install and run on your own computer. Inside PicReviver, the compress, resize and crop tools also run entirely in your browser — nothing leaves the device. Colorize and restore do need the GPU, so those upload, and the file is deleted right after.
It is our page, so yes, treat it accordingly — that is why every claim about another tool is one you can check on their own page in a minute, and why we point at Upscayl and Waifu2x where they are the better answer.
No, and no tool here can be. The model predicts plausible colour from tone and context: dependable for skin, sky and grass, unreliable for a specific shade. Good for bringing a photo to life, not for settling what colour someone's coat was.
Scan it at the highest resolution you can and run restore. AI fills small tears, scratches and noise convincingly; a missing chunk of face is beyond it — that still needs a human retoucher.
6 August 2026. If a price or a limit here is out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.