How the color comes back

A black-and-white photograph already threw the pigment away. The silver, or the scan of it, kept shape and light. It did not keep the dye of a coat or the exact brown of a hillside. Putting color back is an estimate guided by what is still in the frame.

Same pixels

Black to Colour does not redraw the person, change the crop, or stage a new room. The model reads faces, fabric, sky, and light, then lays color onto that photograph. Identity and expression are meant to stay. If a result moves a face or replaces the scene, it has missed the job.

The left and right of a comparison should be one picture. One side is the plate you brought. The other is that plate with pigment estimated on top.

What the pass is asked to do

The colorizing step is instructed to repair an old photograph while it colors: ease scratches, lower noise, and bring detail back, at a resolution the frame can hold. Skin should stay natural. Faces should stay clear and not warp. It is told to refuse a cartoon, an illustration, an oil painting, plastic skin, and color that is pushed too far.

Those are instructions, not a promise that every scratch disappears. A heavy tear, a missing corner, or a face rubbed down to nothing may still show. Color on metal, a uniform, or a flag is a guess when nobody recorded the dye.

How the file is prepared

Very large photos are scaled so the long side stays inside the working size, up to 2048 pixels on an edge. Very small photos are lifted toward a usable short side, without stretching past that same limit. A frame that is extremely long and thin is given a little extra canvas so the picture still fits the model's range. The photograph is not cropped to do this. Padding, when it is needed, sits around the picture.

What you should trust

Trust the shape you already had: the face, the street, the crop. Treat the color as a careful reading of the scene. Share it after you have looked at the whole frame, not because a model said the coat was navy.