ColorHide 1.0.0

Print a color photo as a plain-looking black-and-white page. Scan it, and the color comes back.

The first stable release of ColorHide.

Download

Platform	Installer
macOS · Apple silicon	ColorHide-v1.0.0-macos-arm64.pkg → installs into Applications
macOS · Intel	ColorHide-v1.0.0-macos-x64.pkg → installs into Applications
Windows 10/11 · 64-bit	ColorHide-v1.0.0-windows-x64-setup.exe
Ubuntu / Debian · x86-64	ColorHide-v1.0.0-linux-x64.deb

The installers are not signed with a paid certificate. On macOS, open the .pkg once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. On Windows, choose More info → Run anyway if SmartScreen appears. Every file is listed in SHA256SUMS.txt and carries a GitHub build-provenance attestation.

What's in it

• Hide color: a data-carrying halftone stores the photo's color in the arrangement of the printer dots; the page looks like an ordinary black-and-white print, with dots placed to keep edges sharp.
• Reveal color: scan the page (grayscale, 1200 dpi) and get the color back, protected by Reed-Solomon error correction and redundancy. A small neural network (ONNX, runs on the CPU) recovers it at 2× the cell resolution.
• Printer-style app for macOS, Windows and Linux, with a print panel and live preview: every printer and driver option, Save as PDF, copies, layout, paper, pages per sheet, margins, scale, two-sided, headers and footers.
• Scanning straight from scanners and multifunction printers (ImageKit / WIA / SANE), or import a PDF or image.
• Export the recovered photo as PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, HEIC and more; zoom to full resolution in the app.
• Automatic updates from future releases, verified by SHA-256.

Tips

Print at 100 % scale at the printer's native resolution (600 dpi), ideally on a laser printer. Scan in grayscale at 1200 dpi with sharpening off.

Results from real printers and scanners are very welcome — please use the 🖨️ Print / scan report issue template.