One of the hardest things to do in restoring photos is to make them both smoother and sharper at the same time. It’s common sense, isn’t it? More smooth means less sharp; more sharp means less smooth.
And it’s particularly pertinent when faces are involved because human beings are conditioned to recognise the tiniest differences in faces. All but an unfortunate few people can easily distinguish, for example, one boy or girl from their similarly featured brother or sister.
Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) which can both sharpen and smooth at the same time.
But AI has its own limitations. It achieves its sharpening and smoothing by “making it up”.
I imagine it as a very sophisticated “Identikit”. An AI app looks in its database to find bits of a face that closely resemble the corresponding bits of a face in someone’s faded old or low res photo. It replaces the face in the original photo with a face made up from those closely-resembling bits. (Probably the most obvious example of a potential folly in this is all the mismatched eyes displayed in so many AI-generated restores.)
It has been a hot topic for a while now, in two senses: Hot popularity, because it can do a job very quickly and very easily—and, at times, very well when used judiciously. It can also generate hot discussions when used injudiciously. To purists, AI “enhances”; it doesn’t “restore”.
It depends what you—and I’m talking to both posters and restorers here—want out of a “restore”: an enhancement or a restoration.
I’m not against the use of AI apps. I have one in my toolbox. I use it… sparingly.
But here’s a made up example of where I don’t think it has a place at all:
In 1928 my father travelled to Brisbane, Queensland as part of the New South Wales school athletics team, to compete against the Queensland team.
Now let’s imagine Dad’s team’s photo was put in the paper back in 1928, and then 95 years later—that is, tomorrow or next week—one of my distant cousins posted a low resolution snip of the photo asking Rootschat to “restore” it so they could have a better image of their distant cousin.
The first image below is a low res copy of my dad from the photo, such as you might obtain from a newspaper. The second is an AI’s attempt at a “restore” from that copy; the third is from my high res copy scanned from Dad’s original photo.
I honestly think we are doing posters a disservice by making up images of their ancestors. I would certainly not like to see my own descendants believing that my father looked like the middle image below, let alone perpetuating that image down to future generations.
My pleas regarding AI are these:
Posters: please post as good an image as you can within Rootschat’s 500kb limit.
Restorers: Please ask for better images before working on requests (2 kb? Really?). If you must do a restore where you scale up from 2kb to 500 kb, please tell the poster that the image is almost certainly not what the person actually looked like but a guess by an artificial intelligence app as to what they might have looked like.
Rant over.
Peter
