In my recent review of MyHeritage, I focused on using the app to build a family tree. Today, I want to focus on another feature of the app and the MyHeritage website that provides a different service: the ability to enhance old photographs. Whether you use just the basic Photos app or something more sophisticated like Photoshop to manage and improve your photos, there are already lots of ways to enhance photos. But when it comes to old photographs, such as photographs of what family members looked like decades ago, there are two common issues that can be difficult to fix with traditional software: the color fades over time (and sometimes, there is no color to begin with because the picture is black-and-white), and the photos are not nearly as sharp as modern photographs. MyHeritage gives you the ability to address those two issues — and do so automatically.
Improve photographs
Using MyHeritage to improve the color or sharpness in a photograph is very simple. Upload a photo and choose the option to colorize or enhance. (You can choose either option at first and then you can choose the other option next.) The colorize option will add color to a black-and-white photograph or will enhance the color in a faded photograph. Here are some demos from the MyHeritage website:
I don’t want to share photos, let alone manipulated photos, of other people without permission, so instead I am sharing some old photographs of myself to show off these features. In this first example, I have a black-and-white photograph from when I was in Seventh Grade from a yearbook. I used the colorize feature, and here is what MyHeritage came up with:
I don’t know if those colors are at all true to life, and MyHeritage doesn’t give you the ability to change colors. But the colorized version of this old photo does seem fairly realistic.
There is other software available that can do the same thing. For example, less than a year ago, Adobe added several Neural Engine filters to Photoshop that use AI to improve photos, and one of those new filters automatically adds color to a black-and-white photo with just one click. And the advantage of using Photoshop is that you can add many other adjustments to get just the result that you want. Here is what I created in Photoshop by clicking the colorize button and then spending about 10 more seconds to adjust the color levels:
I think that the color added by MyHeritage is a little better than what I produced in Photoshop in 10 seconds, but if I had spent more time in Photoshop with this picture, I suspect that I could have produced a much better result. Having said that, Photoshop is complicated to use and is incredibly intimidating to a new user. In contrast, most anyone can figure out how to click the one button in MyHeritage to add color to an old photo.
You can also use MyHeritage to improve the quality of a face in an old photo by using the enhance feature. This feature uses sophisticated artificial intelligence — the result of examining a huge number of photographs that are somewhat similar to your photo — to add detail and focus to the blurry portions of a face in your photo. I have a large number of older photographs that were never that sharp to begin with, and they may have even gotten a little blurrier when the photographs were scanned to add them to my Photos library. I found that the MyHeritage enhance feature often produced very impressive results. For example, here is a photograph that was taken of me when I was about 16 months old — first, the version that I had in my Photos library, which I had already tried to enhance using the tools in the Photos app, and second the version produced by MyHeritage just by clicking the enhance button:
Here is a close up on the face to make the difference more obvious:
Of course, I don’t really know what I looked like at this age, but the enhanced version of the photo does seem to me to be a lot more true-to-life. It is certainly less blurry.
Software that attempts to use AI to add details when it is missing from a photograph can sometimes make dramatic mistakes. About a year ago, James Vincent wrote this article for The Verge in which he showed that, because the AI used by one company seems to have been trained on mostly white faces, providing the AI with a fuzzy picture of Barack Obama produced a sharpened result that resembled a white male, not our former president.
Although the AI used by MyHeritage produced good results on most of my pictures, there were a few photos of my family members that did not turn out so well. The enhanced photograph would sometimes look too fake, more like a cartoon than a photo. For example, after I added color to that old picture of me in Seventh Grade, I then told MyHeritage to enhance my face, and I think that the result looks too fake:
Nevertheless, in most of my tests, the enhance feature in MyHeritage produced impressive results. The nice thing about having access to this feature is that if you try one photograph and don’t like the result, just try another one and it may come out better.
Animate photographs
The iPhone uses a feature called Live Photos which can (optionally) record a few seconds of video at the same time that it takes a photograph. As a result, the iPhone can help you to relive a memory with not just a still photograph but also an animated photograph with a small amount of video and sound.
The Live Photos feature has been around since the iPhone 6s was introduced in September of 2015. But what if you have a picture older than that — perhaps much older? MyHeritage also has the ability to use AI to try to create an animated version of the photograph using a technology it calls Deep Nostalgia. The idea is that you may have a relative from many generations ago who you never knew in real life, or a picture of someone now deceased who you did know, and by animating the picture you have more of a sense that you are really seeing that person again.
Sometimes the results are impressive. Since this feature was introduced many months ago, I’ve seen a few examples become viral videos. Here is an example with some historical figures, and while some results are better than others, most of them do provide the illusion that you are seeing more of the person than the picture alone would provide:
On the other hand, in my tests with my own old photos, the feature was interesting, but virtually always produced results that were so obviously fake that they seemed a little creepy.
When you use the animation feature, MyHeritage first enhances the photo. It needs to do this to have a high-quality picture to start with. Then, MyHeritage zooms in on just the face. Finally, the software animates the face. There are lots of different animation styles, so if you don’t like the results of one type of animation you can choose another one. For example, for the old picture of me I showed you above, the default animation style, which MyHeritage simply calls Animation #7, made my eyes seem weird. Click here to play that video (and they use your Back button to come back to this post).
I tried all of the other animation styles, and the one called sideways looked a little better, but it still had the Uncanny Valley effect because it is almost realistic, but not quite. Click here to play the second video.
For me, the animation feature seemed like a gimmick, and after a while, I grew tired of using it. But for some photos, in some circumstances, I’ll admit that it does produce some interesting and impressive results.
Pricing
In the first part of my review of MyHeritage, I mentioned the different subscription plans. If you have paid for the Complete subscription to MyHeritage ($299 a year, but $199 for the first year), you can enhance and/or animate an unlimited number of photos using Deep Nostalgia. The other, lesser expensive, plans have a more limited number of animations and enhancements, but I’m not sure what that number is. I believe that even the free subscription includes a few animations and enhancements so that you have a chance to try out these features. (MyHeritage gave me free access to the Complete subscription for a limited time for the purpose of preparing this review, so that’s the version that I’ve been using.)
The bigger picture
When I use the enhance and colorize features of MyHeritage, I feel comfortable with the results because I feel like I am restoring what was originally there more than I am creating something new. But the Deep Nostalgia animation feature, while interesting, may go a little too far for me. I’m just not sure. I definitely understand the allure of using technology to help to form a greater connection, but there is also a creepiness element for me.
In this recent article by Jason Fagone of the San Francisco Chronicle, the reporter describes how a person who lost his fiancee was able to use a sophisticated AI chatbot program to simulate text messages conversations with her even though she was deceased. The AI looked at samples of her writing and then used that to have conversations with the man. Is this an appropriate coping mechanism or just an episode of Black Mirror?
Of course, as this technology becomes more accessible, it can also be used to create deep fake videos that appear to be realistic, showing a person doing or saying something, when in reality someone just swapped one face for another. One of the best examples I’ve seen of is a series of TikTok videos created by Chris Ume, a visual effects specialist in Belgium. He had Tom Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher act out some scenes and then Ume replaced Fisher’s face with Tom Cruise’s fact, and the results are amazing:
Here is a behind-the-scenes video that shows you how this was done:
Of course, it is easy to imagine this technology being abused: creating fake videos to unfairly embarrass a person, create fake evidence for a trial, etc. A few months ago, Geoffrey Fowler of The Washington Post discussed these issues, and he noted that a woman in Pennsylvania was arrested earlier this year after she allegedly altered photos to make it look like rivals of her daughter on the cheerleader squad were drinking, smoking, and even nude in an attempt to get them kicked off the squad. [UPDATE: If you do not subscribe to The Washington Post, click here to read that article for free using the new Washington Post Gift function.] A more recent story from the Daily Mail indicates that the story may be more complicated, but no matter what happened in Pennsylvania, the Tom Cruise video shows you what is already possible today, and it is a little scary to think of what will be possible in just a few more years as computers become more powerful and the software improves.
To address this concern, MyHeritage creates a small watermark on the bottom left of enhanced, colorized, and animated photos. The MyHeritage website explains: “The magic wand icon appears on all enhanced photos so that users can tell them apart from the original. In photos that were both enhanced and colorized, the magic wand and palette icons will appear side by side on the bottom left corner. We hope that this responsible practice will be adopted by others who use photo enhancement technology.”
Conclusion
Whether you see the Deep Nostalgia animation feature of MyHeritage as a fun and interesting way to bring a photo to life or you see it as something too creepy to ever use, the technology is still fascinating and technologically impressive. The end result you can get from MyHeritage may not be nearly as impressive as what someone like Chris Ume can do, but considering that you can use a feature like this by simply clicking a button and waiting a few seconds, perhaps what MyHeritage is doing is even more remarkable.
As for the colorize and enhance features, I find them to be rather impressive. There is other software available that can do the same thing, but those products can be expensive and hard to use. MyHeritage is incredibly simple to use. By including this technology as a part of a MyHeritage subscription, the company has made the subscription more valuable.
Click here to get MyHeritage for iPad or iPhone (free): 
Someone has not changed appearances since 7th Grade. Props. Good to be that guy.