MyHeritage unveils photo enhancer to bring old blurry photos into sharp focus

Israel-based genealogy company MyHeritage Ltd. has launched a new feature that brings blurry, low-resolution or low-quality photos into sharp focus, the company announced Thursday. The new feature is available on the company’s website and free mobile app for iOS and Android.

The MyHeritage photo enhancer takes old or blurry photos and increases their resolution so that the faces that appear in them are crisp and well defined. Enhancement is particularly useful for historical photos where the faces are often small and blurry, but works equally well on new color photos too. The feature works best on photos in which multiple people appear, and enhanced faces can be viewed one-by-one. The original photos remain intact and are not changed by the enhancement process, which creates separate versions alongside the originals.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in central Israel, MyHeritage enables users to create family trees by searching through historical documents such as census, immigration, marriage, and burial records. The company launched a genetic testing service that provides both DNA matching and ancestry and ethnicity estimates in 2016.