Enhancing Photos

[Homer]

Have you guys seen this new My Heritage app? Their website has a couple of really neat tools. There's a photo enhancer that can restore poor resolution photos, colorize them, and another tool that will animate them to make them come to life. There is a cost, but you can try it out for free for up to 10 photos. 

 

I decided to test it a little bit. First, I started with this cartoon that looked  a little pixelated. Before:

And after doesn't look too bad, but definitely better:

 

So there might be some hope for this. I decided to give it a try with a photo of my college girlfriend:

 

There is definitely a noticeable difference, but not as much for this one:

 

Then I decided to see what it'd be like with an old baseball card:

 

After enhancing it, it definitely looks a lot better:

 

So naturally, I had to try a really old photo of Josh Gibson:

 

And this is what it looked like after:

 

This what it looked like to colorize it:

 

It's a pretty cool tool but does have its limits. But I used to spend weeks trying to restore these old photos just to have a high res photo to make a cyberface. I figured that someone would eventually create an app that could speed it up. There are some pretty cool implications for this. You can obviously make much higher quality portraits for bad photos. Think what that would look like for the classic mods. It's not quite ready for the big times for cyberfaces, but if they improve it, you're talking about some pretty cool implications for modding. But give it a try and post your results below.

[Yankee4Life]

This looks like a very handy utility to have Homer. Thanks for sharing!

 

Nice looking girlfriend. She ought to have been a model.

 

Now is there any way to remove the watermark on these photos/

[Homer]

If you pay for the subscription, it does remove the watermark. Otherwise you have to photoshop them with the first 10 free ones. I haven't played around enough with it to see how it does for resolution, and what sized files we end up with. I'd be curious to see how high of a resolution it can create. 

[Muller_11]

This is a good stuff for portrait making

 

Thanks for sharing 

[Yankee4Life]

7 minutes ago, Muller_11 said:

This is a good stuff for portrait making

 

Thanks for sharing 

 

Homer says you have to end up paying for it to get rid of the watermark but it could be worth it.

[sabugo]

I believe there are quite a few websites around that remove watermarks from photos. 

[Jim825]

That would be great for portraits on the Total Classics mods, where the images we start with are not always the clearest. And since the watermark is in the lower right corner (away from the face), it would get cropped out. 

[Homer]

Yeah it shouldn't be an issue with watermarks. The issue is that you must pay for it. You can only do 10 photos for free. At which point, the watermarks are removed anyhow. But the utility is really neat. I'm really amazed that it chose the colors it did for Gibson's uniform. It was done automatically.

[Jim825]

I looked at their website last night and it took a while to find their cleverly hidden subscription costs. I finally found the cost ($149 per year), which is more than I want to spend for a modding tool. I can live with some less than perfect portraits in the TC mods. By the time I shrink down the images, they aren’t that bad. 

[Muller_11]

There are other image enhancement sites that don't charge as much

[Yankee4Life]

54 minutes ago, Muller_11 said:

There are other image enhancement sites that don't charge as much

 

Ok, like what? Provide links.

[Muller_11]

44 minutes ago, Yankee4Life said:

 

Ok, like what? Provide links.

this is what i use: https://letsenhance.io/ 

[Jim825]

36 minutes ago, Muller_11 said:

this is what i use: https://letsenhance.io/ 

Thanks. I will check it out. 

[Muller_11]

1 hour ago, Jim825 said:

Thanks. I will check it out. 

Give it a try!

anyway, I have another site in case you don't like the results of the first

[Kccitystar]

had to enhance my boy:

[Yankee4Life]

Oh, now that's a good one. 👍

[Homer]

12 hours ago, Jim825 said:

I looked at their website last night and it took a while to find their cleverly hidden subscription costs. I finally found the cost ($149 per year), which is more than I want to spend for a modding tool. I can live with some less than perfect portraits in the TC mods. By the time I shrink down the images, they aren’t that bad. 

Yeah that's the downfall. Though the cheapest plan is $89 a year. If the quality was good enough for cyberfaces, I would consider it. But for what it does, it's too costly.

[Muller_11]

This is the Let's Enhance site, It is one of the best sites when it comes to improving photos.

It gives to you 3 photo enhancement options

 

Photo: for images of architecture, nature, people etc. Most photos captured by a mobile device or digital camera qualifies for the Photo algorithm

 

Digital Art: for drawings, illustrations, paintings, cartoons, anime, et cetera

 

And finally Smart Enhance: It focuses on improving the quality of the image rather than upscaling, retaining visual quality while aggressively cleaning it from degradations. Best works with small over-compressed photos.

 

In each of the 3 options it allows you to increase the size of the image by x2 in size (If you want to increase it beyond x2 for the Photo option, you must pay)

 

Here's an example with a picture of Carl Crawford from Photo Day of the 2008 Season

 

 

 

As you can see, the first image is of original size while the second image was improved 2 times more than the original And it has much better quality. 

 

Free users have 5 free images

If you pay $ 9 a month, you will have 100 images to process each month

If you pay $ 24 a month, you will have 300 images to process each month

 

And finally if you pay $ 34 a month, you will have 500 images to process each month

 

Give it a try: https://letsenhance.io/ 

[Homer]

Yeah looks like the costs are pretty comparable. I wouldn't have a problem paying for it, but there's just something about having to pay a subscription to use a program that turns me off.

[Yankee4Life]

6 hours ago, Homer said:

Yeah looks like the costs are pretty comparable. I wouldn't have a problem paying for it, but there's just something about having to pay a subscription to use a program that turns me off.

 

Same here. For example there was this one blu-ray program that I was interested in getting but I didn't because it only let me use it for one year and then I had to keep buying it after the year was up to keep using it. I avoid software like this.

[Homer]

Me too. If i'm going to be paying a subscription for software, it's going to be something I have no choice in the matter. I otherwise won't support them by subscription.