Unlocking the Past: How AI is Revolutionizing Photo Restoration and Editing

A New Passion: Bringing Old Photos Back to Life

Lately, I've been having a lot of fun with AI-powered photo restoration, taking old photos from family members and archives and restoring them as if they are 100% brand new. The technology to do this has become incredibly accessible and powerful.

The AI Models Powering the Magic

There are plenty of models that can accomplish this. Each allows you to supply an image and use plain English to explain what you want done to it. Some of the key players include:

• Google Preview Image 1: Released in September, this is a powerful option.
• ChatGPT's Image Edit: The well-known AI now includes robust image editing functionality.
• Seedream: A specialized model making waves in the image generation space.
• Qwen Image Edit: Another formidable tool for making detailed adjustments to images.

The Process: As Simple as a Conversation

If you wanted to retain the integrity of an image and just make selective edits, you can say something like, "make this image a color photo that is brand new." A majority of these models will take an aged image and, without changing any of the core details, restore it. Of course, it will fill in details that it can't see in your image—if a face is cut off, for instance, it will recreate it to look brand new.

A Marketer's Dream and a Word of Caution

This leads to potential concerns where people can alter photos in a very realistic way, something that would have been quite difficult in the past. In the future, signing images is going to be extremely important so that people can trust the creator and verify an image's authenticity. If you trust the person's signature on the image, you'll be able to tell if it's real or not.

But in the meantime, this is a marketer's dream. It allows for the rapid creation of hero images, the restoration of old brand photos, or just simple retheming. You could take a photo and say, "make it a black and white ink etching," and it will just do it. That's a major, compelling, and awesome feature.