Palette

The people who benefit most from Palette are those working through volume rather than a single keepsake. Family historians reconstructing a lineage, local heritage groups digitizing municipal archives, documentary researchers preparing archival inserts, and retouchers who would otherwise hand-paint adjustment layers all get a usable first pass from Palette in one upload. Palette also publishes an API, an affiliate program, and an "Engage Us" partner path, so Palette is positioned for embedding into other products as well as direct consumer use.

A working session in Palette follows three published steps. A user uploads a photo or drags in several images at once, picks one of the 21+ color filters shown alongside the preview, and then either downloads the file or clicks the adjust icon to type descriptive keywords before re-colorizing. Palette states that clear descriptions and keywords give the best colorization, which makes the text box the main steering wheel when a jacket, wall, or skin tone comes out wrong. Palette's paid workflow adds automatic filter loading, filter pinning, filter organization, and filter duplication for people who repeat the same look across a collection.

Palette prices everything in photo credits, where one credit colorizes one image logo-free at up to 5000x5000 pixels. The homepage subscription widget shows $72 per year, described as $6 per month with annual billing and a stated 28% saving, bundling 480 credits per year, processing up to ten times faster, watermark-free previews, no ads, and the pro filter tools; the same widget offers 2400-photo and 6000-photo annual tiers whose prices are not printed on the homepage. Palette separately sells pay-once packs of 1, 10, 75, 200, and 500 photos, with the 75-photo pack shown at $49, or $0.65 per credit, and marketed as valid for years with no recurring charge.

The free path through Palette is genuinely usable but visibly limited. Palette offers unlimited color previews at no cost, resizes larger images down to a maximum of 500x500 pixels while keeping their shape, places the Palette logo in the bottom-right corner, and shows ads; signing up adds one free trial credit that produces a clean full-resolution download. Anyone who needs print-size output from Palette therefore has to buy either a credit pack or the annual plan.

Credit expiry is where Palette's terms carry rules the marketing page does not emphasize. Palette's terms state that monthly credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, that credits on an active subscription roll over only up to five times the monthly credit amount, that one-off credits expire 24 months after purchase, and that subscription credits stay usable only while the subscription is active. Palette's terms also reserve the right to block interface access if more than 15% of a user's requests fail to process, and limit refunds to a first-time purchase requested within 14 days with fewer than 50 images processed.

Rights are unusually plain in Palette's documentation. The overview at the top of the Palette terms of service says users retain ownership of images created with the service and may use them for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and that Palette does not claim ownership of generated content. Palette's privacy overview adds that uploaded files are deleted shortly after results are delivered and are not published, shared, or reused except when a user submits them as feedback.

Against general-purpose editors and multi-tool AI photo suites, Palette is narrow on purpose: Palette does one job, colorization, and puts filter choice plus keyword steering in front of the user instead of burying color inside a broader restoration pipeline. Palette's own comparison table claims rival colorizers lean heavily on brown and purple casts, flatten skin tones, miss small details like hands and lips, and require expensive recurring payments, which is a vendor argument rather than a measured benchmark. Buyers who want upscaling, scratch removal, and face restoration in the same pass will still need a second tool alongside Palette.