11 Comments
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Lori Olson White's avatar

Hehe I love the 📞 these are astonishingly good . I’m already thinking of the old damaged photos it might be able to clean up - thanks for doing the hard work of testing and retesting so I don’t have to 😉

Rachel Amick's avatar

Great info! Worked really great on a photo from the late 1960s! Thanks!

Lisa Rex's avatar

Can't wait to try this out. I've been imagining taking the only photo of one my ancestors, and turning them into a colourised avatar that I can animate and add voice to, just to illustrate some of their pivotal moments (I'm thinking of my lady's maid Gerda arranging transatlantic travel for her and her employer, boarding a steamship, that sort of thing).

Barbara at Projectkin's avatar

Fascinating, Denyse. It'll be interesting to see how they (and their competitors) implement and integrate this in photo apps. I'm sure it's been a battle of licensing deals and models, much like the FR business. I appreciate the watermark to indicate that it's been manipulated. It's a reminder that we had no mechanism to do that previously, yet photos have been modified since... well, even before Adobe's Photoshop in the early 1990s.

Gosh, there are whole industries of folks affected by this kind of work, but we've known it's been coming for a while.

Denyse Allen's avatar

Most people could not afford professionals to do photo restoration and I'm thrilled it accessible to everyone now through Nano Banana.

Kristin Rapinac's avatar

I can’t wait to try this out! Last week I used ChatGPT to clear up a fuzzy photo and it completely changed the woman’s face.

Kevin Ferguson's avatar

This is a fun exercise. I've been doing it in Adobe Firefly, which includes partner models like Gemini. It takes some tweaking and patiences, though. Trial and error. I did this with a 1920s photo of my Great Grandfather and my grandfather (age 6) and great aunt. Thanks for writing this!

David Shaw's avatar

This is impressive, Denyse. Thing how far A.I. has come in just one year.

Virginia Allain's avatar

I have loads of vintage photos that need a clean-up. Perhaps I should challenge myself to get them all scanned in first and then choose a month to binge on the restorations.

Lynda Heines's avatar

Denyse, Thanks for this post. AI did a horrible job of fixing my photos. I gave up until I read today's post and this one. Looking at yours, I guess I'll need to bite the bullet and pay to have them fixed. Thanks.

David Shaw's avatar

Girls are always on their phones!