Colorize your black and white photos automatically with MyHeritage In Color™ – MyHeritage February 11, 2020

I meant to post this the other day – Colorize your black and white photos automatically with MyHeritage In Color™ – MyHeritage February 11, 2020: https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/02/colorize-your-black-and-white-photos-automatically-with-myheritage-in-color/.

Important note: for full benefit, you have to be a paying subscriber to MyHeritage, a point missed by several who have posted about this. You get several free colorized photos as a non-paying subscriber.

 by Esther February 11, 2020 MyHeritage Products

We’re excited to announce the launch of MyHeritage In Color™, a groundbreaking feature to automatically colorize your black and white photos, which produces incredible results.

Try MyHeritage In Color™ now

Photos provide a unique view into the lives of our ancestors and relatives, but viewing them in black and white places them at a certain distance. Viewing the same images in color brings them to life like nothing else can. Colorized historical photos can spark interest in the past, and help us relate more personally to events and people from times gone by. It allows us to view these photographs in an entirely new way, giving us new perspectives on the people and places who made us who we are today.

Imagine seeing your grandparents’ wedding photo in color for the first time, or noticing the small details portraying life on the streets of New York a hundred years ago. When you view the colorized images next to the original black and white photos, you’ll be amazed by the difference.

How it works

The photo colorization technology that powers this feature was licensed by MyHeritage from DeOldify, created by software engineers Jason Antic and Dana Kelley. An early version of the DeOldify technology was contributed by Antic to the public domain in November 2018. Antic and Kelley updated it in May 2019. Since then, they’ve continued to improve and fine-tune the technology commercially. Their latest version produces colorized photos of unprecedented quality and is currently exclusive to MyHeritage.

We believe this is the best technology in the world for colorizing black and white photos. The technology was trained using millions of photos, and has developed an understanding of our world and its colors. The results are more realistic and of superior quality to those generated by other automatic colorization tools currently available. The black and white photos remain intact and are not changed by the colorization process, which produces new photos alongside the original ones.

MyHeritage In Color™ works on all photos — even faded photos that still have some color in them. The colors you’ll see in your photos are simulated automatically by the colorization algorithms — there is no manual retouching involved.

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Cost

Anyone can colorize several photos for free. Afterwards, a subscription is required. Users who have a Complete subscription with MyHeritage can colorize an unlimited number of photos. Non-subscribers will notice a watermark of the MyHeritage logo on the bottom right of their colorized photos, whereas Complete subscribers are able to produce colorized photos that are logo-free.

You can learn more about our various subscription plans here.

Improvements

The technology for colorizing photos automatically is amazing, but it isn’t perfect. The perfectionists among you will notice that some colors may seem incorrect or inconsistent. We are constantly collaborating with DeOldify creators Jason and Dana to improve the technology, and those improvements will be rolled out to MyHeritage in the coming months as soon as they become available.

Summary

We sincerely hope that you enjoy bringing your family’s black and white photos to life with MyHeritage In Color™. Please spread the word about this amazing feature so that others can try it too. Enjoy!