Photo Restorer vs Colorizer for Old Photos Damage Repair vs Color Addition — Which One Should You Use First

You have a 70-year-old black-and-white photo. It is faded, scratched, and has a crease through the middle. You want to restore the damage AND add color. You have a photo restorer and a colorizer. Which one do you use first? The answer: restore first, then colorize. The order matters.

If you colorize first, the colorizer treats scratches as image features and colors them. The scratches become colored lines. Restoring colored scratches is harder than restoring grayscale ones. The correct pipeline: scan at high resolution, restore damage with the photo restorer, colorize with the colorizer, upscale with the image upscaler. The photo restorer cleans the image. The colorizer colors the clean image. The order produces a better result.