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MyHeritage Photo Enhancer Goes Viral: One Million Photos Already Enhanced!

  • By Esther
June 22, 2020
MyHeritage Photo Enhancer Goes Viral: One Million Photos Already Enhanced!

At MyHeritage, our passion is to help people connect with their family histories. Earlier this year, we introduced MyHeritage In Color™, a groundbreaking new technology to bring your old family photos to life through colorization. On June 12, we took it a step further by introducing the game-changing MyHeritage Photo Enhancer: 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.

Once again, the response has been incredible. In just a week and a half, one million photos have been enhanced using the new Photo Enhancer tool. Users describe being deeply moved by seeing such crystal-clear images of family members they only knew in their later years — or perhaps had never met. Some were brought near tears to see their ancestors in such realism. A professional photographer expressed wonder at how well the tool works. A genealogy expert blogger discovered that the tool can also improve the quality of scanned documents and make them easier to read!  

Below are some of the reactions we’ve received to the Photo Enhancer:

On the MyHeritage Blog

“This is amazing!” writes Carol Woods in the comments of the MyHeritage Blog.

“Today I downloaded one of my paternal grandparents that I had missed, then colourised it,” another user, Kate, comments. “When I enhanced it and then enlarged it I was close to tears — I had finally met Gran and Grandad as a young couple. The enhancing did a really good job on a not-very-good ~100 year old photo; their eyes looked at me in the eye; I could see Gran’s light blue eye colour and just how much my father was like his mother… Grandad died when I was 2 years old so I don’t remember him, but I can see now just how very much like him Dad’s 2 brothers were, and what a gentle man he was… The app has enabled me to ‘know’ my grandparents in a way that I could not have otherwise. Thank you, MyHeritage.”

On Facebook 

On Twitter 

Genealogy Bloggers

“So I am sitting here early in the morning, the sun just rising over Lake Michigan, and I finally got some time to look at the new MyHeritage Photo Enhancer. And I am trying not to cry,” writes Thomas MacEntee of High-Definition Genealogy. “The photo… is one of my prized possessions. 

I am just BLOWN AWAY at how I can now really see what my mother looked like at age 8. 

The detail is amazing especially when the new enhancement tool is paired with the new MyHeritage In Color™ feature!”

Thomas also decided to try the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer for another genealogy use:

“Recently I decided to use the new MyHeritage Photo Enhancer to see if it would make a scanned genealogy record easier to read … and it did! The photo… isn’t exactly a pretty scan… 

I’ve encountered some really bad scan jobs lately and I’m always looking for ways to improve their quality for research purposes.  I thought, ‘What if I ran it through the new MyHeritage Photo Enhancer?’ And here are the results.

The details are amazing and it is much easier to read.”

After his suggestion, a MyHeritage user wrote Thomas about how useful she is finding the Photo Enhancer:

“This is another “wow” feature from MyHeritage,” writes James Tanner in Genealogy’s Star. “All I can say is that it works on many photos and the results are amazing… It is hard to believe the difference. I have some of the advanced photo editing software that is presently available but I never thought that I could ‘fix’ an out-of-focus image.”

Lisa Louise Cooke from Genealogy Gems writes “Well, they’ve done it again! On the heels of the wonderful photo colorization tool, MyHeritage has launched Photo Enhancer. In just a few seconds sharpens blurry images. I’ve been using it (image below) and I think it’s even more exciting than colorizing photos!”

Conclusion

The Photo Enhancer, together with MyHeritage In Color™, makes MyHeritage the best platform for uploading, enhancing, and sharing historical photos. It allows you to see your ancestors in an entirely new light: clearer, sharper, and more real than ever before.

Give it a try and tell us what you think!

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Comments

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  • namastu

    June 22, 2020

    I used to take information from Wikipedia but when I visited myheritage.com I was amazed by looking at the research level of the content. Awesome website

  • Brian

    June 23, 2020

    Does this enhancer work if you do not have a subscription to My Heritage.

    • Esther

      June 23, 2020

      Hi Brian,

      Yes, after registering for free, you will be able to enhance ten photos for free without purchasing a MyHeritage subscription.

      Best,
      Esther/ MyHeritage Team

  • John Kay

    June 23, 2020

    I am very interested in your colourising tool.

  • Lasse E

    June 23, 2020

    I’ve toyed around with Remini in the past, and were pleasantly surprised at the results. I wonder if MH has the same deal as with the Colorizer, that they are making exclusive updates to MH which will make results better than Remini?

    If not, one important thing to note is that it is based on artificial intelligence, and faces might be inaccurate compared to a real face. If you try to ‘enhance’ yourself on a bunch of pictures, you’ll quickly notice something is pretty off – that’s easier to spot when you know a face well. So just a heads up that the blurrier the original photo, the more inaccurate the result will be. But if you have a reasonably good photo to begin with, the AI can get you some impressive results!

  • Margaret Cumberland

    June 28, 2020

    The MyHeritage photo enhancer looks amazing. Will it work with a page in a book which contains a photocopy of a photo. There is no way of tracing the holder of the original photo.

    • Esther

      June 28, 2020

      Hi Margaret, It should work with a scanned photo.
      Best, Esther / MyHeritage Team

  • Miriam

    June 29, 2020

    I also tried the new functionality and it is really awesome!!! Congratulations

  • Ann Lamb

    July 7, 2020

    I think you enhancer is amazing and would love to use it for all my old photos, but unfortunately I cannot afford the sub. I do think it could be a little fairer to either let there be a monthly sub for older/all people who cannot afford the yearly sub or maybe just a sub for the photo enhancer. So although I would love to be able to use it I regret I disappointingly cannot.
    Ann

  • Darlene Newman

    July 8, 2020

    Impressed!

  • claire houghton

    July 8, 2020

    how do I get started on this

  • DArlene Meador

    July 9, 2020

    Does this cost money?

    • Esther

      July 9, 2020

      Hi Darlene,

      Enhancing the first 10 photos is completely free, although free registration to MyHeritage is required.

      Best,
      Esther / MyHeritage Team

  • JO ANN BEAUMONT

    July 10, 2020

    how do you go about using this? Do you have to join My Heritage to use this ?

    • Esther

      July 12, 2020

      Hi Jo Ann, You will be asked to register to MyHeritage for free to use the Photo Enhancer.

      Best, Esther / MyHeritage Team

  • Natalie

    July 11, 2020

    This tool is really cool! As a graphic design with experience in photography and photo retouching in Photoshop, I’m impressed by the results. It does work best if the faces in the image are somewhat larger. I found smaller, blurrier faces produced inaccurate results.

  • maureen lacey

    July 12, 2020

    really pleased with the photo enhancer tool quite amazing results

  • Roger mills

    July 12, 2020

    I’ve criticised adverts on my Facebook page for advertising this type of feature for being fake with the results that have been shown ,but it appears I might not have been justified in doing so. I don’t know if the Facebook adverts use the same software as the my Heritage site but I can confirm that it is absolutely amazing.My favourite photograph being a Digital photograph taken of a paper photograph of me as a little boy( obviously digital didn’t exist in the early fifties) and the results are incredible. I thought however the software works juggling pixels or whatever it does it might make the picture slightly different …not at all.
    Give it a go. And the first few are free too.

  • Audrey Diener

    July 13, 2020

    I have finished most of my black and white photo’s. This program is amazing. It colors them perfectly natural. This is the kind of program I have always wanted. Thanks for the great job to whoever created it. Thank you!

  • Ray Bray

    July 25, 2020

    Used this on a photo of my family taken in 1974. The photo had been taken quickly in stormy weather on the seafront in North Wales and we were all soaked to the skin. The photo turned out to be bright orange ! I used this ‘ MyHeritage Photo Enhancer’ and the result was amazingly super. Thanks

  • raffaele rampa

    July 28, 2020

    Mi sembra fantastico

  • Reenee

    July 28, 2020

    This is absolutely amazing!

  • Margaret Easter

    October 22, 2020

    If you enhance a picture of yourself and compare it to what you see in the mirror, just remember that what you see in the mirror is a reverse image of yourself! A better comparison can be made by holding the enhanced picture beside your face and looking in the mirror.

  • Vicki

    December 9, 2020

    Unfortunately, I think the technology is still “not there.” Maybe it works on some types of photos better than others. The three I tried, I would not use. The eyes were terrible, it did not pic up my grandmother’s eyeglasses, and it gave my grandmother a full mustache…which she never had lol.
    I’ll wait a while yet for the next generation of the software.

  • Sunny

    April 9, 2021

    Awesome

  • pradtya

    May 25, 2021

    Nice