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Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Amazing New Technology: MyHeritage In Color™

https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/02/colorize-your-black-and-white-photos-automatically-with-myheritage-in-color/
This fabulous new technology has been online only one day as of the date of this post. The concept of MyHeritage In Color™ is fairly simple: it adds outstanding color to existing black and white photographs. Let me start with an example from my own archive. This is an original photo of my Grandmother, Eva Margaret Overson Tanner.


I went to the Colorize your heritage website and uploaded this photo and in about 10 seconds (I have a very fast internet connection) I was able to download the following:


I can now see where the "red" hair in our family came from. This photo now appears to be overexposed which was not so evident in the original black and white (monochrome) version. I pulled the photo into Adobe Lightroom and made so additional edits.


It wouldn't take me much more time to enhance the photo even more. However, I can't imagine how long it would take me to colorized the black and white version, assuming I could figure out how to do that.

Here is another photo that shows a group of people from the Overson family. This photo is from a glass plate negative that I digitized. My Grandmother, Eva Margaret Overson Tanner is standing in the middle of the right side group. She is a lot younger than she is in the photo above.


Now, let's look at the photo after sending through the MyHeritage In Color™process.


Starting back in the mid-1800s, shortly after the invention of photography, colorizing was an extremely slow and tedious process. Here is an example of a hand-coloured daguerreotype by J. Garnier, c. 1850.

By J. Garnier (active ca. 1840s - 1860s)
Interestingly, the skin tones and colors are almost identical to the ones generated by the MyHeritage In Color™process.

What I see in the colorized versions of my own photographs is a lot more detail. Not that the detail is not there in the black and white versions, but the color adds depth and definement to the photos. Here is another example from my own archive of photos. First with the black and white.


Now the colorized version:


I can imagine that there are thousands of people trying to colorize hundreds of people today. I have noticed that some of the links do not work immediately. I suggest waiting until the initial rush wears off. However, as you can see, I was able to colorize these photos.

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