Colorize Old Photos for FREE With MyHeritage in Color

Confession: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Adobe Girl.

It all started many years ago with Photoshop Elements, which was a photo-editing gateway drug for me. Then, a few years ago on Black Friday, I scored a deal on the full version of Adobe Creative Cloud, and now I’m completely addicted.

It’s a fabulous program, but admittedly, not for everyone. The learning curve: she is a steep one.

So if the tedium of hardcore Photoshopping isn’t for you, you’re going to love this: a fun, new tool from MyHeritage that can colorize old photos almost instantly!

MyHeritage In Color™: Quick and Easy Colorizing

We’ve all got ’em: drawers full of old family photos, in sepia, black and white, or faded 1970s Polaroid. I sometimes find that it’s hard to imagine the people in them as real. After all, people are colorful.

What would they look like in color?

Well, now you can find out with MyHeritage In Color™!

You may already have seen your friends sharing their newly-colorized photos on social media. I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing with this tool myself.

Take a look: this cute photo of my mother as a little girl sitting on a pony has been in my collection for years. It’s one of my favorites. When I ran it through the MyHeritage In Color™ “colorizer” (for lack of a better term), I wasn’t sure what to expect. Honestly, I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like in color.

And then, POOF! There was my mother as a little girl sitting on a pony – in living color. It was the first time I’d ever seen a color photo of my mother as a child.

What I did not expect was the visceral reaction I would have at seeing this photo in color.

I was playing around with the app on my phone, trying to explain to my half-interested husband what I was doing. The colorized photo popped up when I was in mid-sentence… and I went speechless.

Then the tears started flowing.

There’s just something about a color photo that makes the people in them seem more REAL.

Seeing my mother’s adorable smiling face, her clothes, the brown and white horse (is that lipstick on the horse?), and the green grass and trees… details I’d never noticed before suddenly POPPED.

And I’m hooked now.

Your mileage may vary. Mine did.

When you use MyHeritage In Color™, keep in mind that your results will vary based on the quality of your photo. Here are a few examples from my own collection.

My maternal grandfather, Marvin Dagle. He died when my mother was 9 years old, so I never had a chance to know him, and I’ve never seen a color photo of him. He was a dapper dresser.

My great-grandparents (Marvin’s parents), Azelia “Zee” Faivre and George Dagle looking sharp. My mother called them “Ma” and “Pa.” I may have met Zee at some point when I was little, but I don’t remember. She died in 1975. George died before I was born.

My paternal grandparents Reba Dunn and Isaac “Lee” Swanay. They were alive until I was in my late 20s, so I knew them “in color.” There seems to be a bit of color bleed from the green plants on Reba.

My great-grandfather (Lee Swanay’s father) is William “Frank” Swanay. He also died before I was born, and this is one of the only photos I have of him. Can I just say… THAT DOG! I never gave him much of a look before, but how cute is he, smiling right into the camera? He really steals the show in the color version.

Colorize your own photos (it’s free!)

MyHeritage In Color™ is a 1-button process for adding color to black and white, sepia, or even faded color images.

How does it work? According to the MyHeritage Blog:

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.

To get started using MyHeritage In Color™, visit myheritage.com/incolor. Click the orange button to upload a photo, or simply drag your photo into the frame on the right.

Once you upload your photo, you’ll be asked to sign in to MyHeritage, if you haven’t done so already. You can use MyHeritage In Color™ with a free MyHeritage account, so create a new account if you need one.[efn_note]Users who have a MyHeritage Complete plan can colorize or restore an unlimited number of photos. Users with a free plan can colorize and restore up to 10 photos for free. Non-subscribers will notice a watermark of the MyHeritage logo on the bottom right of their photos, while Complete subscribers will be able to produce colorized and color-restored photos that are logo-free.[/efn_note]

When your colorizing process is finished, your photo will pop up on the screen. Have fun sliding the arrow back and forth to see the difference for a while before sharing it to Facebook and Twitter, copying the link so you can email it to all your family members, or downloading it to your computer or cloud storage.

A word of caution: Give the colorized photo a new name if you plan to save it in the same location as the original. Adding “colorized” or something similar (anything, really) to the filename will save you from the pain of overwriting the original.

After you’re finished, both original and colorized photos will be stored on MyHeritage. Select “My photos” from the “Family tree” menu to find them again. Note that the “Colorize photos” link is right below.

Observations

I’ve used lots of different types of photo editors and “colorizers” over the years. MyHeritage In Color™ is very good – especially for a free tool – but I did notice a few things.

• Some photos take to the colorizing process better than others. Black and white images seem to turn out more vivid than sepia, especially very yellowed sepia. But I really have no idea how the algorithm works. This was just what I saw from my own experience.
• The process does not repair photo imperfections. For example, if your photo is of poor resolution, is grainy, or has scratches, tears, dust spots, or any other defects, you will still see those in the colorized version.
• Sometimes colors bleed, as you saw in the photo of my grandparents. I don’t know if Reba’s dress was, in fact, green, but I’m reasonably certain that her hair was not.
• MyHeritage In Color™ will work with a free account. But… your colorized photos will be watermarked with the MyHeritage logo (the saved original will not be watermarked). If you want to avoid that, you’ll need to purchase a subscription.[efn_note]Alternatively, you could upload a photo with some blank space at the bottom, and then crop the logo off later, but I would never tell you to do that.[/efn_note]

Wrap Up

MyHeritage In Color™ is definitely a lot of fun to play with. For a free, 1-button tool, it does an amazing job of colorizing your photos.

This Adobe Girl is impressed.

That said, I will probably import some of my newly-colorized photos into Photoshop, clean them up, and add more color. I just can’t help myself.

How about you? Have you tried MyHeritage In Color™? Did you get good results? What was your reaction to seeing your black-and-white ancestors in living color?

Please share in the comments!

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