peterm1
Veteran
I have posted this here rather than in the post processing forum as that forum seems to focus on film, Lightroom etc. - i.e. more traditional tools. So I am treating this as a general discussion on AI mediated PP not on techniques etc.
So, over the past week or so I have been experimenting with A.I enhanced image processing using (for the most part) Google Gemini a free A.I. based tool (or perhaps mostly free - I have not explored this aspect yet and suspect more advanced tools are available at a price). I learned of this through a Facebook group dedicated to posting vintage images (mostly 19th and early 20th century) of my home city, Adelaide, South Australia. In the post he advised members how the software can be used to enhance and colorize etc. very old photos. I tried this with some very old family photos and was impressed, then the thought struck me that I have some older photos made by myself, mostly back in the early digital era where (a) I had no clue what I was doing and (b) the sensors and firmware were much more primitive than it is today. In particular some images had very low resolution - not quite literally 'postage stamp" size but not far off either, very frequently excessively grainy, quite often blurry (my fault mainly), having poor exposure and generally beyond redemption using traditional post processing software and techniques because too much of the subject was missing from the captured image due to the above flaws.
I decided to try to salvage some of these disasters and indeed in many cases (though not all) it proved to be possible to do so with results which in some instances were pretty damn good. Admittedly, I noticed that in some cases where the starting images were too poor, I could see that the A.I produced results did not look perfect because it was being forced to make elements of the image up out of whole cloth (as they say). I noticed this occasionally, especially in portraits where the end result looked ever so slightly "off" in terms of proportions of a face etc. (Bear in mind that A.I sometimes has to make pixels up from thin air and best guesses to fill in blanks.) And in some cases I felt the result looked a little artificial or even clinical and hence a bit "plasticky". Nevertheless surprisingly often I was singularly impressed with results. For now, I will just post two of myself so you can see for yourself how this works (or not). The starting image in this pair was made quite recently actually but the image was of me at the computer and was taken by a P.C.'s built in camera in a darkened room. As might be expected the result was pretty poor. I directed the AI to enhance detail, remove artifacts, improve tonal values and saturation and enlarge the image. I was particularly impressed with how the A.I. responded to my request for it to remove the flare in my eye-glasses.
I still have some reservations about how far an AI processed image can be taken before it can be regarded as a wholly unethical outcome. But I can certainly see promise in these tools' ability to fix problems that were otherwise beyond my ability to fix and maybe beyond the ability of anyone to fix by any other means.
One afterthought. I tried much the same on a scene from a photo of Budapest made around 2000. It was shot on Ilford XP-2 (black and white) and later scanned on a flat bed scanner, probably at fairly low res. One instruction I gave the AI was to colorize the image in "colors suited to late Spring or early Summer in Budapest, Central Europe" While the colors resulting were a little painterly, damn me, the choices made by the AI tool were pretty acceptable. A lucky guess? Time will tell I suppose if it can be replicated with other locales. But it left me wondering, is this thing clever enough to know what Budapest in late Spring looks like?
In the first photo below the final result appears first.
So, over the past week or so I have been experimenting with A.I enhanced image processing using (for the most part) Google Gemini a free A.I. based tool (or perhaps mostly free - I have not explored this aspect yet and suspect more advanced tools are available at a price). I learned of this through a Facebook group dedicated to posting vintage images (mostly 19th and early 20th century) of my home city, Adelaide, South Australia. In the post he advised members how the software can be used to enhance and colorize etc. very old photos. I tried this with some very old family photos and was impressed, then the thought struck me that I have some older photos made by myself, mostly back in the early digital era where (a) I had no clue what I was doing and (b) the sensors and firmware were much more primitive than it is today. In particular some images had very low resolution - not quite literally 'postage stamp" size but not far off either, very frequently excessively grainy, quite often blurry (my fault mainly), having poor exposure and generally beyond redemption using traditional post processing software and techniques because too much of the subject was missing from the captured image due to the above flaws.
I decided to try to salvage some of these disasters and indeed in many cases (though not all) it proved to be possible to do so with results which in some instances were pretty damn good. Admittedly, I noticed that in some cases where the starting images were too poor, I could see that the A.I produced results did not look perfect because it was being forced to make elements of the image up out of whole cloth (as they say). I noticed this occasionally, especially in portraits where the end result looked ever so slightly "off" in terms of proportions of a face etc. (Bear in mind that A.I sometimes has to make pixels up from thin air and best guesses to fill in blanks.) And in some cases I felt the result looked a little artificial or even clinical and hence a bit "plasticky". Nevertheless surprisingly often I was singularly impressed with results. For now, I will just post two of myself so you can see for yourself how this works (or not). The starting image in this pair was made quite recently actually but the image was of me at the computer and was taken by a P.C.'s built in camera in a darkened room. As might be expected the result was pretty poor. I directed the AI to enhance detail, remove artifacts, improve tonal values and saturation and enlarge the image. I was particularly impressed with how the A.I. responded to my request for it to remove the flare in my eye-glasses.
I still have some reservations about how far an AI processed image can be taken before it can be regarded as a wholly unethical outcome. But I can certainly see promise in these tools' ability to fix problems that were otherwise beyond my ability to fix and maybe beyond the ability of anyone to fix by any other means.
One afterthought. I tried much the same on a scene from a photo of Budapest made around 2000. It was shot on Ilford XP-2 (black and white) and later scanned on a flat bed scanner, probably at fairly low res. One instruction I gave the AI was to colorize the image in "colors suited to late Spring or early Summer in Budapest, Central Europe" While the colors resulting were a little painterly, damn me, the choices made by the AI tool were pretty acceptable. A lucky guess? Time will tell I suppose if it can be replicated with other locales. But it left me wondering, is this thing clever enough to know what Budapest in late Spring looks like?
In the first photo below the final result appears first.
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