Bringing photos of my grandfather to life

I never met my paternal grandfather. He was born in 1889 and died in 1960, when my father was fourteen. I have a handful of low-resolution scanned photos of him.

Fortunately, they’re great photos which capture him as a young World War I soldier in the Royal Scots regiment and, post-World War 2, with my dad aged 2 and 10.

With my dad’s permission, I decided to try colourising and animating the photos using AI.

Below are the results.

They’re imperfect* but are the closest I’m going to get to seeing my grandad in motion (until the technology takes another leap forward, as it inevitably will).

I emailed them to my dad who loved them, commenting that the one of the two of them down by the river Swale “reinforces my stored recollection of Dad…I have watched it about 8 times since it arrived”.

Whilst colourising and animating photos in this way inevitably throws up questions of permission and authenticity, with the appropriate labelling, I can imagine these sorts of animated images being used as an alternative to the done-to-death Ken Burns effect on programmes like ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’.

*Aside from a few AI glitches which I’ve become very attuned to, a quick bit of research suggests my Grandad’s Royal Scots uniform would have been khaki rather than blue, although the colourisation tool wasn’t to know this (ChatGPT-4o’s native image generator, which I wrote about last week, did render the uniform in khaki, but lost my grandad’s likeness).

If you’re interested in colourising and/or animating your own family photos, these are the steps I took:

1. Extending and upscaling

I used Recraft to extend the images (aka outpainting) to standard landscape/portrait dimensions and to upscale some of them to a higher resolution (NB. there’s a risk of diminishing the subject’s likeness in the process of upscaling).

If you do use Recraft, I would recommend paying for 1 month of its $12 Basic plan, as Recraft claims ownership of any images generated using its free plan, which are also public.

I could equally have used Ideogram, although uploading images and private generation requires the $20 Plus plan.

You can skip this step if you’re happy with the dimensions and resolution of your reference photo.

2. Colourising

I tried various different colourising tools (Canva, cutout.pro, DeepAI, Hotpot, Kolorize) but most oversaturated the image, resulting in purple lips and fingers.

Palette.fm produced the most consistent results and provides a nice range of filters to choose from. Slightly to my surprise, the colouriser on genealogy site MyHeritage also did a decent job (although you need to subscribe to get rid of the watermarks).

3. Animating

I tried using KLING, Luma Dream Machine, MiniMax, Pika, Runway & Sora to animate the colourised image but found Google Veo 2 (accessible via Freepik in the UK) produced by far the best results, maintaining the subjects’ likeness and applying an appropriate amount of animation (Pika had my grandad doing a jig in his WW1 uniform whilst Sora went full waxwork).