Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve seen some pretty epic examples of manual photo restoration and colorization. But there’s now a website that promises equally impressive results. MyHeritage uses neural networks to restore your old photos and give them color. And judging from the examples, it truly does a pretty good job for artificial intelligence.
Photo restoration and colorization gives new life and new dimension to damaged old photographs. A recent video from James Berridge of JBColourisation shows just how impressive this process can be. He used a heavily damaged diptych of mother and her baby from circa 1903, with the damage splitting the image apart. In his timelapse video, you can see how he fixed it and “reunited” the mother and her child after 116 years.
Daguerreotypes break down with time and can eventually become ruined and unrecognizable. But researchers at Western University in Canada have created a new technique that recovers even the most damaged daguerreotypes. It reveals what lies under the severe degradation and shows the images in all their original detail.
When the Content-Aware Fill tools were added to Photoshop a number of years back, they were hailed as being the best thing since Photoshop itself was created. Now, with a couple of clicks, you could get rid of the stuff you didn’t want in your image and Photoshop would magically replace it with what you wanted. The reality was that it didn’t always do what it said on the tin, leading to the nickname “Content-Aware Fail”.
It’s come a long way since then. It’s smarter than it was, and soon it may expand to include fill sources from Adobe’s vast stock library. Nvidia’s taking a slightly different approach, though, using deep learning AI to help fill in the gaps, and while the aesthetics are still fairly primitive, the AI seems to do a great job of recognising what’s what.
We’ve shown you some amazing colorization and restoration work before. But if you are a baseball fan, you will definitely love the series we’re about to show you today.
Chris Whitehouse is a sports lover and a photo restoration and colorization artist. He brings his two passions together, and as a result, he breathes a new life into century-old photos of Major League baseball players and games. Using Photoshop and lots of patience, skill, and research, he teleports us to the baseball fields from 100 years ago and creates a new look on the history of sports.
How many old photos do you have in your family archives that seem to be damaged beyond repair? Ukrainian photo retoucher magician Tetyana Dyachenko would be able to restore them. She specializes in photo retouching and uses this skill to restore old photos. Thanks to her Photoshop skills and eye for detail, she gives new life to even the most damaged photos.
Photo colarization is a thing. We want to look at color photos, but we only had black and white film a few decades ago, so there is a gap to fulfill. I guess our kids will want to hologrimize our colored photos when they grow up, but this is another story).
Up till now, colorizing has been an intense and laborious process taking hours of work from skilled artists. A new algorithm from Algorithmia wants to change that. Algorithmia released a new cloud platform that takes in a black and white photo and spits out a colorized version of it. The idea is that you can instantly create a color photo from an old black and white print of say Dear Aunt Daisy.
Colorizing monochrome photographs is nothing new. In fact, photographers were hand-coloring photos as far back as the 1800s. But, one of my gripes has always been how artificial and “flat” the images always looked. Even with Photoshop, many people seem content to just slap a single color over an area and call their work done, but color in the real world is not so simple.
Retoucher Joaquin Villaverde released an excellent video of a digital restoration and coloring of an old, damaged photograph in which he restored the image to its former glory and then brought it to life with meticulous color, yielding a beautiful end result.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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