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MyHeritage photo enhancer shows you what your ancestors really looked like

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We’ve seen some pretty epic examples of manual photo restoration and colorization. But there’s now a website that promises equally impressive results. MyHeritage uses neural networks to restore your old photos and give them color. And judging from the examples, it truly does a pretty good job for artificial intelligence.

The main goal of MyHeritage doesn’t have much to do with photography per se. “Our passion is to help people connect with their family histories,” the founders write on MyHeritage blog. But a part of your family history is your collection of old family photos, right? This is why MyHeritage introduced two tools that will help you see them in a new light.

Earlier this year, MyHeritage In Color was first introduced. As you can probably assume, it’s a tool that gives color to your old photos. On 12 June, the site introduced MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, and that’s a tool I’m particularly impressed with. It enhances your photos and brings blurry faces into sharp focus. So when you combine the two tools, you can see your ancestors (or even yourself) in a totally new light.

I have this pretty blurry and underexposed photo of myself (yes, that’s a beer bottle, don’t judge me). I absolutely love that moment but the photo itself looks like crap. So I tested MyHeritage Photo Enhancer with this image and it did a darn good job!

While I was at it, I gave it a shot with this portrait of my mom and me. The tool recreated my face relatively accurately, only my eyes are darker and a bit sadder. My mom’s bangs look a bit odd, but I think that the tool did a pretty good job with the face.

Since I was on a roll, I wanted to test out MyHeritage In Color as well. I don’t have any old family photos at my place, so I used this one that I shot on film earlier this year. I’m not super-impressed, but it’s not bad either. I tested it out with a few more portraits, and the results were of the same quality.

Here are the results people shared on Twitter. There are some folks that weren’t too impressed, claiming that the tool wasn’t even close at recreating facial features. But I believe it depends on many factors on the photo itself. Oh, and it’s worth noting – it doesn’t do anything for landscapes. I tried. Anyways, give it a shot and let us know how it worked for you.

 

[via Bored Panda]

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About Dunja Djudjic

Dunja Djudjic is a writer and photographer from Novi Sad, Serbia. You can see her work on Flickr, Behance and her Facebook page.

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