Color enhancement is a crucial yet challenging task in digital photography. It demands methods that are (i) expressive enough for fine-grained adjustments, (ii) adaptable to diverse inputs, and (iii) able to preserve texture. Existing approaches typically fall short in at least one of these aspects, yielding unsatisfactory results. We propose GenColor, a novel diffusion-based framework for sophisticated, texture-preserving color enhancement. GenColor reframes the task as conditional image generation. Leveraging ControlNet and a tailored training scheme, it learns advanced color transformations that adapt to diverse lighting and content. We train GenColor on ARTISAN, our newly collected large-scale dataset of 1.2M high-quality photographs specifically curated for enhancement tasks. To overcome texture preservation limitations inherent in diffusion models, we introduce a color-transfer network with a novel degradation scheme that simulates texture–color relationships. This network achieves pixel-perfect texture preservation while enabling fine-grained color matching with the diffusion-generated reference images. Extensive experiments show that GenColor produces visually compelling results comparable to those of expert colorists and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. We have released the code and dataset.

Digital image enhancement aims to deliver visually striking, pleasing images that align with human perception. While global techniques can elevate the image's overall aesthetics, fine-grained color enhancement can further boost visual appeal and expressiveness. However, colorists frequently face challenges in achieving accurate, localized color adjustments. Direct composition of these local edits can result in spatial color inconsistencies. Existing methods, including color style transfer and image harmonization, exhibit inconsistencies, especially at boundary regions. Addressing this, we present ChromaFusionNet (CFNet), a novel approach that views the color fusion problem through the lens of image color inpainting. Built on the Vision Transformer architecture, CFNet captures global context and delivers high-fidelity outputs, seamlessly blending colors while preserving boundary integrity. Empirical studies on ImageNet and COCO datasets demonstrate CFNet's superiority over existing methods in maintaining color harmony and color fidelity. Robustness evaluations and user studies have further validated the effectiveness of CFNet. In conclusion, CFNet introduces an innovative approach to seamless, fine-grained color fusion, paving the way for advancements in the domain of fine-grained color editing. Code and pretrained models are available at our project page: https://yidong.pro/projects/cfnet.