Today I saw the below tweet from a genealogist that I follow, describing a new free photo enhancement feature from the Heritage.com genealogy website. In addition to choosing to enhance, and to colorize a photo, the new tool can identify a face in you photo, and bring it to life with some simple animation. And it’s really very very cool.
So I thought I’d give it a try. These are my GGG Grandparents Vitus DeDera and Rose Bicek on their wedding day, September 21, 1912. Vitus was 21, and Rose was 20 on their wedding day. And as is common in photos of the era, smiles as we know them today were rarer. This wedding photographer didn’t shout out ‘say CHEESE’ before snapping this shot.
I’ve written about Vitus (Victor) and Rose, and what I’ve learned about their courtship here in my blog 15 years ago.
When I uploaded the above 109 year old photo to Heritage.com and asked it to ‘animate’ it, the tool first enhanced the photo, creating a much sharper image, and it then identified each face in the photo and asked me which one I wanted to animate. Not to play favorites, I naturally did them both. And here’s the results.
Vitus Dedera – animated
Rose Bicek Dedera – animated
Pretty cool, and a little bit unnerving isn’t it?! It’s amazing what a few blinks, a tilt of the head, and some lip movement can do to breathe life into a static image. Freaking realistic! And in the context of this photo, where I imagine Victor and Rose, holding still in their pose for this important photo, pondering their future lives together, their animated expressions convey a thoughtfulness that feels very genuine to me.
Of course, this technology would, I assume, work on any photo. But modern day moving images aren’t quite as, well, eye opening are they (see videos, animated gifs (hard G)). It’s in bringing old photos to life that I see the magic in this tool. It makes me think of the portraits on the walls of Hogwarts, or the Mirror of Erised in which young Harry Potter could see his dead parents as they were in life. Cool stuff, I’m gonna be making LOTS of these!