Investigating your family’s origins can be fun and rewarding. But go back very far, and you’ll run into an issue with history: color photography. In the grand scheme of things, color photos haven’t been around very long. Now Ancestry.com has a fun new tool to help automatically colorize old photos.

Most older photos are in dire need of touch up. Technology has advanced a lot in a short period, and in many cases, physical photos weren’t stored well. Ancestry already offers free tools to digitize and retouch old photos easily, but now that tool is getting even better.

While it’s still under beta, the new colorize feature does exactly what it says on the tin. Hit the colorize button, and within a few minutes or two, the photo will get a splash of (digital) paint. The process is entirely automated, and you can’t control how the final results come out. So thankfully, if you don’t like the end result, you can undo the attempt.

But at least the tool is easy to use: just find a photo in your family tree, use the edit function, then hit colorize. It works both on the web and in the app, and you can colorize any photo you have access to. That means you’re not limited to just photos you personally uploaded.

The feature is available now and free, but it’s in “beta,” so Ancestry could update how it works or remove it altogether.

Source: Ancestry via PetaPixel