So, this weekend, I discovered MyHeritage.com’s Deep Nostalgia™ photo animator. (There went many, many hours playing with that tool.) It’s fantastic and creepy all at once.
I took some old photos of my dad and animated them out of curiosity. It cleaned them up really nicely – sharpening the focus and making colors more clean/vivid – then made his face come alive. Certain angles were a bit off, but the overall effect was cool. (Dad didn’t like having his picture taken and avoided being in almost all the home movies, so I don’t have a lot to compare with, unfortunately…)
The AI tries to pick an algorithm that works with the angle of the head best, but you can choose from up to 10 variations of movements to find the one that suits you best for each pic.
I added one of George Washington to my KL DeWitt Family Research Project site based on the Gilbert Stuart painting. Click on the pic to see the animation.
In the meantime, this is my dad, using the #10 algorithm after it auto-enhanced the focus/colors. Dad was about 25 here. (He was killed 3 years later while being robbed.)
This is the original photo from about 1965. (I’m the one on the right, driving my Mom crazy by sucking my thumb and “ruining my teeth,” leading to years of braces. LOL):
The enhanced (both smoothed and sharpened) animated version:
