HOW ACCURATE IS MY HERITAGE COLOUR?

I have been a member of My Heritage MH, since I first started researching my family in 2009. It was the first genealogy site I subscribed to, and even though I have dabbled in Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search, I have always remained loyal and faithful to MH. It is no surprise then that once I felt it was time to do mine and my husband’s DNA, I also did it with MH. So yes, you can say I am a My Heritage enthusiast. In fact, have been so for years.

A couple of years ago, I noticed they launched a photo restoring and colourising feature on their site. More recently they launched a colour balancing feature as well.

Many have asked about my thoughts on photo colourisation apps and in my opinion, they are ok to use, as you would a filter, and they can give you a rough idea of what a photo may look like in colour, but not more than that. This question was asked so often that in September 2019 I decided to post a video on YouTube.

Last week I was contacted by a former client with the following message:

Hi Claudia, (...) you restored and colourised my great grandfather’s world war 1 portrait (…) I have since started using My Heritage, and realise you may have got the uniform colour wrong as My Heritage shows it as blue and not green like you did (…)he was a pilot and in truth I was surprised to see a green uniform(…) my father was in the RAF and his uniform was blue (…)

I was taken a back by this message and explained to the lady that the colour was indeed olive green and that MH uses an algorithm to select colours which is not really accurate.

English fighter pilot Albert Ball wearing the same uniform worn by my former client's relative.

In order: Original - Colourised by Me - MH Colour

I often see MH colourised images on my social platforms but never took the trouble to read people’s comments until I got this message. Since then, I started looking into it and was shocked to find that there are a vast number of people who genuinely believe what they see on MH is the real thing!

Fast forward to today and a highly respected and extremely knowledgeable name in the Genealogy world shared an image on twitter after using the colour feature on My Heritage and stated the following when asked about if the colours were guesses:

“My Heritage takes the guess work out. I have a membership and I can upload and enhance the photos in seconds.”

On the FAQ session of their platform, My Heritage makes the following statement about the accuracy of the colours: