A few months ago, MyHeritage.com introduced a colorization tool for photos. I blogged about it here and showed examples of photos I used the tool on and the amazing results.
Now MyHeritage.com has introduced an enhancement tool for photos, too.
I couldn’t wait to try it out after watching this webinar about what the tool can do: New Ways to See Your Photo Clues on My Heritage with Maureen Taylor. (I don’t know why there’s a line through this link because it works! Also, the presentation starts at about the 8:45 mark so fast forward to there.) Maureen Taylor, AKA The Photo Detective, is skilled at what she does. Check her out here.
For this week’s blog post I’m showing before and afters of photos I used both tools on. Are the tools perfect? No. Are the enhanced images reliable? A lot of them are, and one of them made my cry. Some enhancements are questionable. Others are just outright funny.
The following transformations are good or great.




I think it’s a good resemblance.






my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my aunt.
Sallie Pyles Price (1862-1940), Goldie Price Heiser (1893-1919), Dorothy Heiser Brown (1915-1998)
A Bad One
The next one is a photo I enhanced only in hopes of improving the color balance. Clearly the tool is not good for that.

and Jerry’s daughters.
You can see the one on the right shows little improvement. A fail for sure.
And now for the funny.

These are two photos that I used both the enhancement and colorization tools on.
The one on the left is from the family-famous Rainmaker photo. It made me laugh! Adolphus looks to be cross-eyed and wearing glass. He wasn’t cross-eyed and he didn’t wear glasses, but the tool can only work with what it sees so shadows and lines look like things other than they are. The photo on the right is a much better likeness, although it looks like he shaved off one side his mustache and not the other. But it sort of looks that way on the left, too. Was that fashionable then!?!


I so enjoyed enhancing and colorizing these photos. I hope you enjoyed them, too, and that they made you smile and chuckle. Please comment below and let me know what you think.
Copyright © 2020 Nancy H. Vest All Rights Reserved
I enjoyed looking at these pictures. These tools are pretty amazing. I love the look in Joel Daniel’s eyes. I would love to have had a conversation with him. There is something so familiar about him. The pictures make me cry, too. Thank you for sharing!
I’m glad you enjoyed them, Claire. And thanks for commenting. Does Joel Daniel maybe remind you of your grandfather? I’d love to have had a conversation with him, too. 🙂
Love you Nancy, Thank you for all your pictures and sharing them Love Gayle
You’re welcome, and I love you, too. 🙂
You always have such beautiful pics and in color, great! Your Joe Daniel and my dad could be brother’s. I would like software that would take all of our photos and mix them to make photos of our like 4th GGF that we don’t have or mix our DNA and come up with the photos of them.
The Martin men all have about the same features. Many have brunette curly hair, right? Of course, we have blondes as well, but the eyes have the same hue. Our Martin’s had blue and green eyes unless their mother had brown eyes. I’ve enjoyed the heritage as well, they’ve improved their site.
Thanks for commenting, Suzan. A software like that would be wonderful! I’d love to see a photo of your dad. 🙂 Curly brunette hair, yes. I don’t know what color eyes Joel Daniel’s parents had, but one had to be brown and one blue. I say this because his wife (my grandma) had blue-grey eyes, and some of their children (my mom and her siblings) were brown eyed and some were blue eyed. The only way that could happen is if Joel Daniel got dominant brown eyes from one parent and recessive blue eyes from the other. Kind of a simple way to look at it, but it works.