Using AI to Restore Old Photos Actually Works – Fstoppers

It's absolutely mind-blowing how much artificial intelligence has come to play a central role in photography. There's the presence of it in everyday usage in smartphones, with things like portrait mode and night sight, but now, even more powerful tools are available to desktop retouchers. Just check out how it works on this 70-year-old photo.

Coming at you from Glyn Dewis is a video that incorporates a bunch of different tools in the service of restoring a damaged 70-year-old family photo of his. While ordinarily, this would be a quick retouch job to remove scratches and tears, in this particular case, Dewis wanted to be able to not only do that, but increase the resolution and make it an aspect ratio that would work for an 8x10" print as well.

The first tool Dewis uses should be pretty familiar to most photographers, and that's one of Adobe Photoshop's neural filters, the photo restoration filter, which does a decent job of most basic cleanup functions. As he points out, there are some other functions there to colorize photos, but for this video, he sticks to black and white.

The mind-blowing part came in how Dewis changed the aspect ratio of the photo. Using a tool called DALL-E 2, which describes itself as "a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language." Dewis was able to pop his photo into the system and have the AI fill in the missing background details quite convincingly, such that he now had enough headroom to crop into the aspect ratio he wanted.

I got so wrapped up in how this tool works. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Dewis' use case is an interesting one for photographers.

The last step is a piece of software that's not as esoteric as DALL-E, and that's Topaz Gigapixel AI, an image upscaler that can increase the size of an image by 600%, since DALL-E is a bit limited in its output resolution.

With those three tools, Dewis was able to retouch his old photo with much less effort than it would have taken in the past.

What do you think of the results?

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Using AI to Restore Old Photos Actually Works - Fstoppers