Over the past few years MyHeritage has rolled out a line of photo editing and enhancing tools that allow you to do everything from colourize a black and white picture to create a full fledged talking video of your ancestor. On a few specific occasions throughout the year, they offer free access to these tools however the majority of the time they require a subscription. I began to wonder if what they were offering was truly unique and superior to other sites. To determine if what they are offering is unique and superior, I am going to compare the results of their tools to that of other sites that I have found. All the ones that I am comparing to offer their services for free, but dont necessarily offer the same array of photo editing/enhancement tools.
To facilitate the comparison I am going to be using the pictures below. I chose to colourize and enhance two pictures because an increased sample size would allow me to test a wider range of colours and image qualities. The left picture is from the late 1920s where as the right picture is from the mid 1940s.
It should be noted that the MyHeritage colourization tool has undergone several revisions over the years; however, for the purpose of this comparison I will only be using the results of their July 2021 model. Those results will be compared to those produced by the following __ sites: Colorize, HotPot, Img2Go
This site allows you to colourize, enhance, retouch, and repair pictures (however only colourization and repair are free). There is an additional feature which allows you edit the uploaded file prior to colourizing/enhancing it. The comparison below shows how well the results of their colourizing tool stacked up against MyHeritage.
For image 1, the results were rather underwhelming. Colorize did slightly tint the foliage in the image, however the that was more or less where the colourization ended. When compared to MyHeritage, Colorize proved to be significantly lacking in several areas. As a whole, the image appeared washed out, with some areas looking virtually the same as the original. For the portions that were colourized, the results were a little questionable. For example, the foliage had strong warm undertones which seems unrealistic to me considering the type of plants in the garden. Above all, Colorize lacked the most when it came to colourizing the entire image. Areas such as her face, hands, and much of her body were missed. As a result, it did not feel as if Colorize brought the image to life in the same way that MyHeritage did.
Image 2 yielded slightly better results, however they still did not match the quality produced by MyHeritage. Even though more of this image was colourized, much of it was washed out (most noticeably the ground is lacking the mossy green shown in the MyHeritage version).
HotPot offers a 'Colorization Factor' feature that has settings of 12, 15, 18, 20, and 25. My understanding (after playing around with this) is that a higher factor creates a wider range of colours. For this reason, I have opted to perform this comparison with a colorization factor of 25.
Similar to Colorize, HotPot struggled to accurately colourize both images. Image 1 came out with heavy red tone throughout, plus two random blue corners (which clearly belong to a building not the sky).
Although Image 2 yielded more accurate colours, the entire image was left with a blue tint and a large parts of the image were not colourized.
Img2Go requires a 'rendering factor' and 'AI model' to be defined before colourizing the image. The rendering factor can range from 7 to 40, with a higher value producing higher quality results. Users are given the choice between two models - a generic model, and a nature/people model. I found that selecting the later model produced more accurate results, and therefore is the one that I used for the comparison.
Unlike the previous two models, Img2Go colourized almost the entire image and did so with accurate (albeit slightly faded) colours. The results remind me of the earliest version of MyHeritage in Colour. Considering this is a 100% website, I am impressed and would use it again.
The second picture produced similar, slightly worse results. Unlike the first picture, the majority of the subjects remain uncolourized. Due to the faded colours, it was difficult to tell if the ground was even colourized at all (I had to zoom in to see that there were small green tinges for the moss).
Photomyne is probably the most straight forward of the four sites.
The results for picture one are comparable to that of Img2Go, with the main difference being that this result has slightly more vibrant colours but also a small inaccuracy. What I found interesting about this comparison is that both Photomyne and Img2Go both failed to colourize the exact same hand.
Like the previous four models, I had varying levels of success with each picture. In this case, picture 2 is almost entirely colourized but has a strange blue hue on the lower half and red/yellow hue on the top half. Somehow, this strange division of hues did not produce entirely inaccurate colours.
Summary
After reviewing the above sites, the final rankings are:
The rankings were based on the quick summary below which evaluated each site's colourization, vibrance, and accuracy. Colourization represented how much of the photo was colourized where as the accuracy represented the colours that were produced. Each site was then given a thumbs up or down based on its overall performance.
It should be noted, that there is no "one size fits all" model for colourizing pictures. As the above comparison demonstrated, what worked best for one picture didnt always work equally well for the other. With that being said, MyHeritage did produce the most consistent and high quality results although that does come with a steep price tag.
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