Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/01/new-photo-enhancing-ai-includes-physical-damage-restoration-option.html
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Except that the faces don’t look the same to my eye after restoration. The shapes of the faces are subtly changed by the placement of shadows, & that changes the expressions & even the characters, as well.
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There always seems to be a patina of the programmers’ aesthetics in these. I was using an Asian retouching app the other day and it ended up making me look slightly Asian.
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Well that would definitely not be surprising in a trained system, where the library of samples trained on are Asian.
The video reminds me of a problem I see in some of the groups that offer free restoration. Many photos are damaged too much to simply mirror image copy from one side to the other for the restoration. You either need to draw in a guess of what the original feature would have looked like by hand, or need a large library of facial features shot from various angles under various conditions that closely match what the original subject may have looked like - and the latter is a task that a trained AI is particularly good at. The result however, it’s not so much a restoration of the original, but a very sharp and precise looking guess of what the original could have looked like. A manufactured reality.
I’ve seen restorations where the retoucher has swapped out damaged portions showing clothing with other clothing from other photographs, and gotten the era completely wrong. Same for glasses. So it would be easy for AI, as well as human retouchers, to accidentally alter history in very convincing ways without meaning to do so.
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ok the results are pretty interesting, but that video-- oh my head. i’ll stick to using photoshop. i find manually working on the images pretty soothing.
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Yeah, I agree with that. I used to work in pre-press, both as a scanner operator using a Crosfield drum scanner, and retouching the scans afterwards, this being before digital cameras became available.
I would do subtle retouching to people, where there were transient blemishes like spots or skin problems, but otherwise leaving things as they were.
Old photos, like the above, I would do my best to improve contrast in faded pictures, and remove cracks, scratches and foxing, but any large missing areas I’d leave, trying to reconstruct being almost impossible without spoiling the historical context.
I have a copy of an old photo of the staff of a paper mill, from the 1920’s or thereabouts, which shows my grandfather, which I used to work on during breaks at work; I reckon I spent four or five days cumulatively on it, and in doing so found a number of tiny details that looked like flaws, and which pleased me immensely, the whole process was very therapeutic. Fortunately, there were no large areas of damage, and the original photo was from an 8”x10” plate camera, so very detailed in the first place.
Sadly, I no longer do that kind of work.
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Does it work on paintings? (Asking for a friend)
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