Restoration or resurrection?
My amazingly skilled wife restores old faded photos (as in the attached image). Software to do this is constantly improving and innovating, and keeping up is a constant learning curve, even over only several months. New skills and tools are acquired almost by the week and old skills and ways of doing things drop by the wayside fading a lot faster than the photos !
AI is increasingly among those tools constantly becoming available. Some of its results can be almost miraculous – though often they go far too far and have to be moderated, ie., they can over-smooth and over-restore detail, changing the look of a face too much to be acceptable. Faces are something AI cannot do very well yet – though it improves by the month.
It can enlarge low resolution photos to printable resolutions and protect details surprisingly well in the process. It is good at colouring gray and white or faded photos but you have to be very careful about the selections and “text prompts” to get the colours right. It is very good at filling in holes and tears in a photo. AI is an evolving technology and does not do photo restoration all by itself – contrary to what people increasingly think. It has to be instructed every step of the way and the restorer is always cleaning up after it and still having to do a lot of restoration the “manual” way.
But whether the restoration is manual or AI-assisted the restoration of a photo can often appear miraculous to a client when they see a very faded old photo of a loved one transformed, or a black and white photo colourised to the remembered hues.
My wife finds that the end result can be so good it reduces a client to tears. It is as if the person in the photo has been resurrected!
It makes you wonder what a Resurrection at the end of time would be like?