Dussehra and Diwali are around the corner, and so is spring cleaning. While at it, it’s natural you will be hit by a big bout of nostalgia as you rummage through a shoebox of old photographs from your childhood. The picture of you playing Spiderman in second grade. Of a picnic to Red Fort with your classmates. Or even a hideous picture of you in a now-outdated mushroom hairdo. Here’s a way to save those memories without having to spare physical space for them. Try out the free AI-based photo restoration tool, GFP-GAN.
Generative Facial Prior—Generative Adversarial Network uses in-built AI tools to smoothen creases in photos, enhance colours and erase blurs/stains to make the photographs like it was clicked a minute ago. The web tool has been rated ‘Best photo restoration tool of 2022’ by PopPhotography, a go-to portal for photography aficionados.
All you need to do is upload the photo, click the “Restore photo” button, and, voilà, the image is ready for download—for free and without watermarks. What more? While most free tools are clunky with pop-ups demanding you to register, log in or opt for a registration. GFP-GAN poses no such hassles. This tool created by researchers at Tencent, a China-based internet firm in June 2021 and made public this year, has been consistently rated high by online tool/app reviewers.
The ‘Blind Face Restoration’ technique used in this tool relies on facial priors, such as facial geometry prior or reference prior, to restore realistic details.
Face images have geometry priors, which include facial landmarks (eyes, nose, lips, ears), facial parsing maps (it predicts pixel-wise labels for components of a target face in an image) and facial heatmaps.
A word of caution from photo enthusiasts, however, who say AI uses intuition to correct photographs based on the mood and ambience in the picture. Deepa Sahayak, a Hyderabad-based photographer, warns that sometimes AI-retouched photos can change the narrative of the photograph. “We used a software to create a collage of a family with photographs of many deceased members. But the retouch made smiles as frowns and vice versa and it looked creepy. So use any such tool wisely.” The fact, however, that not many can infuse life into an old, torn photo is a game-changer. Log on to app.baseten.co and retouch your favourite photos.