Coloroid AI vs DDColor

Coloroid AI is a photo restoration app for damaged, blurry, faded, or black-and-white images. Recreate applies full restoration, Colorize adds color, and Descratch removes damage while leaving the rest of the image alone. The app detects cracks, creases, missing corners, and water stains, sharpens soft focus, and restores washed-out contrast. Its colorization gives portraits skin, clothing, and scenery colors suited to the era. Start with a library photo or photograph a print with a phone; a flatbed scan is optional. Images can also arrive through the share sheet. Compare before and after, then save, print, or share the result. The restored image is saved as a new photo, leaving the original unchanged. Coloroid AI runs on iOS and macOS, requiring iOS 17, iPadOS 17, or macOS 14 with an Apple M1 chip or later. It offers a free plan; Pro is $49.99, paid once.

DDColor is a free model for adding color to historical black-and-white photos and recoloring anime-game landscapes. It uses multi-scale visual features to optimize learnable color tokens for automatic colorization. The repository offers paper, ModelScope, artistic and tiny pretrained variants; the maker recommends ModelScope for images outside ImageNet and identifies tiny as the lightest option. Local inference scripts and a runnable Gradio demo are documented, alongside inference guidance for Hugging Face Hub and ModelScope. The repository also links to Replicate demos and an API. Users can train with ImageNet or a custom dataset, and the documentation covers ONNX export with an example using the tiny model. Requirements are Python 3.7 or later and PyTorch 1.7 or later. The repository includes an Apache License, Version 2.0, and lists no paid plans or product usage limits. One stated limitation is that colorfulness loss can result in unattractive color blocks, including red artifacts.