There is little doubt that A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is having a profound (and growing) influence on our lives and our society with great concerns about it’s use and more particularly its abuse! Like any tool or new technology, there are trade offs between positive and negative effects dependent on the motives of those using the technology. It’s always been that way! A can of petrol can power a car and get us from point A to point B, or it can make a Molotov cocktail!
In the photographic field it can provide tools with exciting and valuable use (as demonstrated in this post) or can be used to create a distorted or deceptive “reality”. (See the earlier post: A.I. Don’t believe what you see)
Rescuing a flawed photo using A.I.
Today’s image was captured on colour negative film back in 2001 and the negative later scanned into the computer. A young man happily poses for my camera surrounded by the textiles on his market stall in a small town in western China. The photo would have been taken using a mid range zoom and the camera settings are long forgotten. What is apparent is that the image could have done with a faster shutter speed as there is some softness due to motion blur. Reviewing the image all these years later, I was about to hit the delete button when, I decided to try out Topaz’s Photo AI enhancement plugin just to see what, if anything might be achieved. The results can be seen below, the first image getting only a simple initial adjustment in Lightroom.
Above: Initial edit in Lightroom
Taking the above image into Photoshop, I carried out some cropping, cleaned up some of the edges with content aware fill and clone stamping, and did some simple contrast enhancement.
Above: Standard processing in Photoshop but not using Topaz
The image is improved but still not to an acceptable standard. The image was then sent into the Topaz plugin where it was enhanced using the default settings.
Above: Enhanced using Topaz Photo A.I.
Is the image perfect? Of course not, but the improvement is remarkable and beyond anything that might have been achieved with conventional sharpening and noise reduction tools. To my mind, the image has been saved.