The original photos (generally black and white) were cropped uniformly to 4:3, then uploaded to the MyHeritage “See your heritage in color” app, which also gives you an option to “Enhance your photos“. The resulting photo was downloaded and archived alongside of the original.

Colorizing was generally successful in creating realistic tones with face and hair (though there was one case of adding a blue tint to hair). It may be that some results are too ‘warm’ for these pale skinned ancestors, but that would require elders with a long memory to adjudicate. Colorizing did some weird things with clothing — e.g. putting blue suits and red dresses on generally conservative folk.

Where the original was in color, the colorizer reverted to correcting the color and did a generally good job of this.

Enhancing did some remarkable things with grainy or poor quality photos. But, having gotten used to the real-life poor quality of these photos, some of the results seem a bit unreal. Enhancing increased the photo resolution and size.

At this stage (or perhaps earlier) I should have spent more time with the downloaded photos in my photo app to make necessary corrections. Flaws and artifacts tend to be magnified by enhancement and animation.

The downloaded photo was then uploaded to the “Animate your family photos” — Deep Nostalgia™ app where I always selected the realistic option. After waiting minutes for the results to appear, I could then download the 12 to 16 second long mp4 file, which is now being hosted by YouTube.

Many of these animations were excellent. But there were some failures, especially with open mouths and teeth.