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This Online Photo Enhancer Helps People See Their Ancestors Clearly And Here Are 30 Of The Best Restorations
MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform that helps people to connect with their family histories. Earlier this year, they introduced MyHeritage In Color™, a new technology supposed to bring old family photos to life through colorization. But On June 12, the company took it a step further, introducing a tool that enhances photos by bringing blurry faces into sharp focus.
"When combined, MyHeritage In Color™ and the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer can reveal your ancestors as you've never seen them before," the company wrote on its blog. "The technology for enhancing photos was licensed by MyHeritage from the creators of the Remini mobile application. They developed machine learning technology to enhance photos by upscaling (increasing the resolution) the faces that appear in them. This produces exceptional results for historical photos, where the faces are often small and blurry, but works equally well on new color photos too. Enhancement works best on photos that feature multiple people, and allows you to go face by face to see each one enhanced."
MyHeritage really believes that it's the best technology in the world for this kind of work. "No other company has succeeded in developing photo enhancement technology of this quality. The results are crisp and truly outstanding."
Continue scrolling, check out what the enhancer is capable of and tell us in the comments whether you agree with this ballsy statement!
More info: myheritage.com
This post may include affiliate links.
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#9
Tolga ÜSTÜN 4 years ago
Imagine that you are posing to a photographer and be like "this ones gonna be famous one day in hundred years"
#22
Dave In MD 4 years ago
The chevron below the crossed cannons on his rating badge should be red.
#24
Loki’s Lil Butter Knife 4 years ago (edited)
I would love to know what Algorithms MyHeritage uses to colourise and enhance these old photographs. The little boy in the center of the photograph looks like his left leg and right hand have been mistakenly coloured grey.
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What do you think ?
Marek Yanchurak 4 years ago
Zoom in and enhance, Enhance. Enhance! Look this is just guesswork on the AI's part. They've seen/processed enough hi res photos of people to be able to competently fill in the details, but they're still doing just that - filling in the details. They are not pulling that information out of the photographs themselves. It's interesting, but lets not assume it's something that it's not.
N G 4 years ago
That's exactly what i was thinking, thanks for typing it in to legible English
Load More Replies...
Dror Caspi 4 years ago
I uploaded a blurry photo of my family. Definitely not us after reconstruction. Yes, you get clear photos but of random people.
RaroaRaroa 4 years ago
I thought that would be a good way to test it. Upload bad quality photos of people you actually know. Thanks for saving me from wasting my time. :-)
Load More Replies...
Hans 4 years ago
This sounds like an advert for this service. Sure, the results look impressive and seem to make history more tangible. However, what you see on the enhanced photo is not how the person(s) looked like but how an AI algorithm predicts they might have looked like. This makes a huge difference!
Fixin'Ta 4 years ago
Looks to me like it's super close. Our minds can extrapolate what the images probably looked like for real, and that's what the AI is doing in "print" form. I'd rather have a close approximation to what my g-g-grandparents looked like than be stuck with a blurry image that doesn't get any closer than the AI approximation.
Load More Replies...
John Forman 4 years ago
Have they tried using it on those blurry photos of Bigfoot? That I would like to see!
iblowsheep 4 years ago
I would bet that for every one of these "impressive enhancements" there are dozens of failures.
WilvanderHeijden 4 years ago
Ads are getting smarter and you pay for your enhanced photos with your privacy and data and even money when you decide to subscribe to My Heritage.
Tor Rolf Strøm 4 years ago
See!? This is what I was saying! A week or so ago, I commented on a post about movie myths, and one was about "enhance" in movies, where they enhance a blurry or pixilated photo. Just a few years ago that was impossible, but now? Its god damn reality! It's just so cool.
Christine 4 years ago
Professional photographer here. I find this service odd as most of the images are from older photographs that just need to have a better scan. The 'blur' we see here is due to a low res digital scan, but the real image (prints or even better, negatives or color slides) will have all this information and more without having to have a computer 'guess' what your family looked like. I don't see any film grain, meaning these images have all the information for sure!
Fixin'Ta 4 years ago
But if a blurry scan is all you have (as is the case for me, with several photos that have been shared around the family, and I don't have access to the original, or even to the person who has the original), then maybe this is a decent choice to get a better image...?
Load More Replies... MrTree1779 4 years ago
Half of these are truly "de-blurring" the image, guessing at what the details are. And they do a good job. The other half are just "colorizing" black-and-white photos, and not "enhancing" by adding detail. And 1/4 of these images are famous people, so, no points there.
Tor Rolf Strøm 4 years ago
Just incredible! does seem to have a slight problem with chins, but hey. Imagine this in ten years time... just imagine!! as a visual artist I fear for my job!
deanna woods 4 years ago
I have an old photo of my grandmother and great grandmother when my grandmother was about in her teens. I love this photo because it shows the youth and vibrance of them both. I didn't really get to know my grandmother because when I was two she had a stroke and spent the last seven years of her life in a nursing home.
Josh Dukes 2 years ago
I use the MyHeritage software and it can be good, but it can also be REALLY bad. Not every image can be enhanced without getting something that looks like Sloth from the Goonies. We're talking offset eyes, messed up teeth, etc. If it's a bad image, you'll get a bad enhancement. You'll also sometimes end up with a beard on a female relative because the AI will read shadow as hair. That said - some are REALLY good. I was able to take my parents wedding photos from 1980 and get some jawdropping new prints of my grandparents and family members because the original was good enough to create a sharp, beautifully lifelike enhancement. I can use MyHeritage to get a photo part way there, but there's still no substitute for a good run through photoshop. For example, many of the images above show weird red/pink/purple clothing when we know it was probably black/grey/white/navy for the time period. Photoshop helps to restore those AI mismatches back to what is more historically probable.
Paul Shenton 3 years ago
The colorization does not do red hair well...or at all. It presumes that hair is on a spectrum of blond to brown to black.
Diana Cartwright 4 years ago
I didn't realise you could only do 9 or ten photos for free. Now my family wants to kill me because we share IP adress...
Donna LeBlanc 4 years ago
I have been doing hobbyist digital photo restoration for a few decades. I worked with MyHeritage's photo enhancer last night, and after some pixel finangling (and a few cuss words), I was finally satisfied with the end results I got. While the MyHeritage offering does some incredible things with old images that are well beyond the abilities of the average non-pixelsmith, it is advisable that the photo scans get a "pretreatment" in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to increase contrast, tone down sepia/browning, despeckle/deinterlace, and take out blemishes that can interfere with the MyHeritage algorithms' "guesswork". The algorithms' preset options add details and texture in badly blurred or unclear spots, and those options can vary greatly, which is why some of the "after" photos look weirdly deformed. The clearer and lighter the original image is, the more pleasing the post-enhanced image will be. Below is one of my images' comparisons. DGDL-MH-Co...23cd82.jpg 
Denise Mclean 4 years ago
Outstanding photo enhancement. It is amazing to see these people so clearly from the past. It is a little eerier too looking back in time like this. Makes you feel like they are awakening from their dead past, but at the same time, what stories they likely could tell. It is like a time machine, only with people ?
Thumbs Down 4 years ago
I have to admit, I'm skeptical. is this entire thing just a HOAX? July is nearing its end, so I'm wondering is there such a thing as "August Fools Day"? (the other 'A' month). Because I'm just about CERTAIN that some of these blurry "Before" pix are ACTUALLY ( -- secretly -- ) the "AFTER (processed)" version -- meaning they have been digitally blurred, to exaggerate the difference. ...exactly the same trick of sticking out your gut for the weight-loss BEFORE photo, and then sucking in for the (20-seconds) AFTER-shot, without even thinking to perhaps change clothes or restyle the hair or even waiting half-an-hour for the light-source to change. Which also means: that the software did not have the blurred shot to work from, but a clear(-er) initial photo. (???) What IS quite telling here, though... is that we are NOT seeing examples of sufficiently blurry pix of CURRENT CELEBRITIES who we very well KNOW exactly what they actually DO look like.
Gonzalo Terán 4 years ago
I can´t thak you enough for this info... I´m turning my old family photos into something incredible. Seeing my grandmother enhanced like that from a quite old picture brought me to tears... Beautiful!
SirPatTheCat 4 years ago
Ahaha imagine finding some dramatic black and white pictures from present day and running them through the color filter xD like "huh...some books...not very dramatic anymore..."
Karen Gomez 4 years ago
Wow amazing! I just love the style and these people are beautiful. So well dressed. I love it!
Marek Yanchurak 4 years ago
Zoom in and enhance, Enhance. Enhance! Look this is just guesswork on the AI's part. They've seen/processed enough hi res photos of people to be able to competently fill in the details, but they're still doing just that - filling in the details. They are not pulling that information out of the photographs themselves. It's interesting, but lets not assume it's something that it's not.
N G 4 years ago
That's exactly what i was thinking, thanks for typing it in to legible English
Load More Replies... Dror Caspi 4 years ago
I uploaded a blurry photo of my family. Definitely not us after reconstruction. Yes, you get clear photos but of random people.
RaroaRaroa 4 years ago
I thought that would be a good way to test it. Upload bad quality photos of people you actually know. Thanks for saving me from wasting my time. :-)
Load More Replies... Hans 4 years ago
This sounds like an advert for this service. Sure, the results look impressive and seem to make history more tangible. However, what you see on the enhanced photo is not how the person(s) looked like but how an AI algorithm predicts they might have looked like. This makes a huge difference!
Fixin'Ta 4 years ago
Looks to me like it's super close. Our minds can extrapolate what the images probably looked like for real, and that's what the AI is doing in "print" form. I'd rather have a close approximation to what my g-g-grandparents looked like than be stuck with a blurry image that doesn't get any closer than the AI approximation.
Load More Replies... John Forman 4 years ago
Have they tried using it on those blurry photos of Bigfoot? That I would like to see!
iblowsheep 4 years ago
I would bet that for every one of these "impressive enhancements" there are dozens of failures.
WilvanderHeijden 4 years ago
Ads are getting smarter and you pay for your enhanced photos with your privacy and data and even money when you decide to subscribe to My Heritage.
Tor Rolf Strøm 4 years ago
See!? This is what I was saying! A week or so ago, I commented on a post about movie myths, and one was about "enhance" in movies, where they enhance a blurry or pixilated photo. Just a few years ago that was impossible, but now? Its god damn reality! It's just so cool.
Christine 4 years ago
Professional photographer here. I find this service odd as most of the images are from older photographs that just need to have a better scan. The 'blur' we see here is due to a low res digital scan, but the real image (prints or even better, negatives or color slides) will have all this information and more without having to have a computer 'guess' what your family looked like. I don't see any film grain, meaning these images have all the information for sure!
Fixin'Ta 4 years ago
But if a blurry scan is all you have (as is the case for me, with several photos that have been shared around the family, and I don't have access to the original, or even to the person who has the original), then maybe this is a decent choice to get a better image...?
Load More Replies... MrTree1779 4 years ago
Half of these are truly "de-blurring" the image, guessing at what the details are. And they do a good job. The other half are just "colorizing" black-and-white photos, and not "enhancing" by adding detail. And 1/4 of these images are famous people, so, no points there.
Tor Rolf Strøm 4 years ago
Just incredible! does seem to have a slight problem with chins, but hey. Imagine this in ten years time... just imagine!! as a visual artist I fear for my job!
deanna woods 4 years ago
I have an old photo of my grandmother and great grandmother when my grandmother was about in her teens. I love this photo because it shows the youth and vibrance of them both. I didn't really get to know my grandmother because when I was two she had a stroke and spent the last seven years of her life in a nursing home.
Josh Dukes 2 years ago
I use the MyHeritage software and it can be good, but it can also be REALLY bad. Not every image can be enhanced without getting something that looks like Sloth from the Goonies. We're talking offset eyes, messed up teeth, etc. If it's a bad image, you'll get a bad enhancement. You'll also sometimes end up with a beard on a female relative because the AI will read shadow as hair. That said - some are REALLY good. I was able to take my parents wedding photos from 1980 and get some jawdropping new prints of my grandparents and family members because the original was good enough to create a sharp, beautifully lifelike enhancement. I can use MyHeritage to get a photo part way there, but there's still no substitute for a good run through photoshop. For example, many of the images above show weird red/pink/purple clothing when we know it was probably black/grey/white/navy for the time period. Photoshop helps to restore those AI mismatches back to what is more historically probable.
Paul Shenton 3 years ago
The colorization does not do red hair well...or at all. It presumes that hair is on a spectrum of blond to brown to black.
Diana Cartwright 4 years ago
I didn't realise you could only do 9 or ten photos for free. Now my family wants to kill me because we share IP adress...
Donna LeBlanc 4 years ago
I have been doing hobbyist digital photo restoration for a few decades. I worked with MyHeritage's photo enhancer last night, and after some pixel finangling (and a few cuss words), I was finally satisfied with the end results I got. While the MyHeritage offering does some incredible things with old images that are well beyond the abilities of the average non-pixelsmith, it is advisable that the photo scans get a "pretreatment" in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to increase contrast, tone down sepia/browning, despeckle/deinterlace, and take out blemishes that can interfere with the MyHeritage algorithms' "guesswork". The algorithms' preset options add details and texture in badly blurred or unclear spots, and those options can vary greatly, which is why some of the "after" photos look weirdly deformed. The clearer and lighter the original image is, the more pleasing the post-enhanced image will be. Below is one of my images' comparisons. DGDL-MH-Co...23cd82.jpg
Denise Mclean 4 years ago
Outstanding photo enhancement. It is amazing to see these people so clearly from the past. It is a little eerier too looking back in time like this. Makes you feel like they are awakening from their dead past, but at the same time, what stories they likely could tell. It is like a time machine, only with people ?
Thumbs Down 4 years ago
I have to admit, I'm skeptical. is this entire thing just a HOAX? July is nearing its end, so I'm wondering is there such a thing as "August Fools Day"? (the other 'A' month). Because I'm just about CERTAIN that some of these blurry "Before" pix are ACTUALLY ( -- secretly -- ) the "AFTER (processed)" version -- meaning they have been digitally blurred, to exaggerate the difference. ...exactly the same trick of sticking out your gut for the weight-loss BEFORE photo, and then sucking in for the (20-seconds) AFTER-shot, without even thinking to perhaps change clothes or restyle the hair or even waiting half-an-hour for the light-source to change. Which also means: that the software did not have the blurred shot to work from, but a clear(-er) initial photo. (???) What IS quite telling here, though... is that we are NOT seeing examples of sufficiently blurry pix of CURRENT CELEBRITIES who we very well KNOW exactly what they actually DO look like.
Gonzalo Terán 4 years ago
I can´t thak you enough for this info... I´m turning my old family photos into something incredible. Seeing my grandmother enhanced like that from a quite old picture brought me to tears... Beautiful!
SirPatTheCat 4 years ago
Ahaha imagine finding some dramatic black and white pictures from present day and running them through the color filter xD like "huh...some books...not very dramatic anymore..."
Karen Gomez 4 years ago
Wow amazing! I just love the style and these people are beautiful. So well dressed. I love it!
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