Photo Enhancer

 I haven't been writing as much lately as I haven't found any new books I want to read and review (yet), I seem to be growing pickier and pickier, at least when it comes to 'Christian' books. And I haven't yet found any more history books that I want to read and review. But in the meantime, I've been working on a lot of family history/genealogy research stuff for fun.

 

One of the resources that I use for that is MyHeritage, I utilize their free family tree building software. They came out with a special technology that really, really impressed me.  It impressed me so much that I wanted to share it here.  They have released a Photo Enhancer, which brings the faces of people in your old photos into sharp focus using a 'deep learning' technology….which, somehow, seems to be able to figure out what blurry faces looked like in real life…if that makes any sense…

 

Anyway, I tried it out when they first came out with it, and was kind of impressed, but it didn't quite work on some of the photos I was uploading and I reached the limit of how many photos I could do with my free account (10).  Then, this month they announced that they were letting people enhance as many photos as they wanted, for free, for a month (Ends Sept 10th).  So I decided to do it some more, uploaded more photos, 'enhanced' them and became more and more impressed.  So impressed that I just have to advertise it.

Here's an example.  This is an old photo of my great grandfather and his family (so, great great aunts, uncles and great great grandparents too).  

And here's that same photo enhanced:

You might think, well I don't see too much of a difference.  Well, look at what happens when you zoom in.  Here's my great, great grandmother and  great, great Grandfather (Before and after enhancement) zoomed in:

Here's one of another relative:

 Now, it's not perfect.  Sometimes I'll do a photo and my relatives will confirm that it doesn't look much like the person it is enhancing. Sometimes, the results are truly ugly and, every once in a while, it will try to enhance faces that aren't really there.  Let me give you an example of one we found hilarious:

Here's a screenshot of the page where I enhanced an old photo:

 At the bottom of the page you can see the circular images of the faces it detected to enhance.  There is only one person in this photo, but the enhancer detected two faces.  The white square on the image is where it found the other face.  It found one in the flowers.  When you zoom in here's what it did to that spot:

Pretty creepy!!! :) 

So it does make mistakes, but I'm still very impressed with how well it does on other photos.  You can download the enhanced photos, just know that if you're using a free account (like I am) then it will put the MyHeritage logo, and little enhancement wand logo on the downloaded picture.  

Anyway, so it's free to enhance as many photos as you want until September 10th.  You probably ened to make a free account with MyHeritage though.  https://www.myheritage.com/photo-enhancer