How I Built a Pipeline to Restore Old B&W Photos to 4K Color Using Open-Source AI

I tested 8 different open-source AI upscalers and restoration tools to find the best pipeline for converting old black-and-white film footage into 4K colorized images for a YouTube history channel. After days of testing on rented GPU servers, the winning pipeline is surprisingly simple: Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 does everything — upscale, restore, AND colorize — in a single prompt, in under 60 seconds.