The joys and horrors of enhancing family history photos

I have a new toy this week – and it’s awesome! As a researcher of my family history, I must say that My Heritage‘s photo enhancer program is now one of my favourite online activities.

The first step is the photo enhancer, which sharpens the details:

Then, once the photo has been enhanced, if it’s black-and-white, you can choose to use the colorizer:

It’s amazingly effective for single portraits or small groups, although I found its use of colour tends to err on the side of grey.

Magical! Not every picture comes out well, but in general, I think they’ve done a great job.

For creating family history books or childhood memoirs, the photo enhancer is particularly helpful, and it’s wonderful to see a recognisable face appear from a small, blurred photograph. I wouldn’t necessarily use the coloured version every time, but it could be useful to create a coloured image to make the cover of the book more appealing.

The program is designed to recognise faces, and it can produce a recognisable face from just a few visual clues. It shows a few faces in circles below the enhanced photo, so you can appreciate just how great the improvement is.

There’s just one rather creepy problem.

Given certain patterns in the background, it can also ‘recognise’ faces which aren’t really there, and it adds them below the photo. There’s something horrifyingly spooky about watching an imaginary face appear as you move the slider!

At least… I hope it’s imaginary.