Enhancing Photos with AI

[mudman]

Yes, thanks for that Paul. A surprisingly easy process.
Thought I'd give it a go so tried it on this picture from North West Inlet in Ogof Craig a Ffynnon.
Not a very good photo anyway but it would be a good test.
Definitely an improvement. I didn't follow the tutorial exactly because my levels are the inverse of the surfing picture but definitely an improvement and although it doesn't replace avoiding the haze in the first place, it is great for rescuing pictures for uploading to places like forums and club websites.

 

[Tommy]

Adjusting the levels like that also has the effect of boosting the saturation of colours (as can be seen in your image mudman), if you go to "Colors">"Hue-Saturation", and bring the saturation level down a little, you can season to taste...as it were.

 

[mudman]

Adjusting the levels like that also has the effect of boosting the saturation of colours (as can be seen in your image mudman), if you go to "Colors">"Hue-Saturation", and bring the saturation level down a little, you can season to taste...as it were.

Thanks, I've tried that and it does tone down the garishness a bit.
How's this?

 

[Tommy]

Looks cool, there's another tool called the Clone Tool that you could use to remove the tape with some care, but all this is subjective as to what you consider important in the shot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axFwQfiGmaU

https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-clone.html

 

[Tommy]

Hope you don't mind, I had a little go myself.

 

[Tommy]

Some quick fakery.

 

[mudman]

Hope you don't mind, I had a little go myself.

Not at all. I like to see what others can do with stuff I've had a go at.

I like the clone tool and have used it myself although it can be a long process.

Here's a before and after of a picture of Straw Chamber in OCAF that I messed around with a while ago.

Both pictures have had to be scaled to fit in the forum limits:

 

[Chocolate fireguard]

From Chocolate Fireguard:
?It seems to me that there is a certain amount of information in a digital image, and while it is easy to lose some of this it is not possible to increase it - any process that "enhances" the image in some way must do so at the expense of degrading it in some other way.?

From 2xw:
?Actually, in the case of AI, machine learning and neural network approaches, it is adding information to the point of making a whole new photograph.?

OK, I give in.
People seem to understand different things when it comes to ?information?.

 

[tony from suffolk]

A good example of adding to existing images is video technology, where sophisticated algorithms interpolate the existing images to add ?missing? information by looking at the surrounding pixels. This works extremely well in the latest 4K displays when upscaling standard and high definition video.

 

[RichardB1983]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some astronomers started to use a technique where they used cheap webcams to take short-ish videos of planets or the Moon through amateur telescopes, and then there was a free program called Registax which would align and stack the video frames together. By tweaking a few settings, it was often possible to produce resultant photos that looked like they'd been taken with a professional telescope, and far beyond the normal capabilities of the telescope or camera for a single image.

The idea was that you could vastly improve the signal to noise ratio by stacking a few thousand video frames of the same object and hence bring out much more detail than was possible by taking a single photograph.

It makes me wonder whether you could achieve quite good results just by taking a mobile phone or point-and-shoot camera video of a cave or mine scene, appropriately lit up etc. and use similar techniques to bring out the details. Part of the need in astronomy is that the atmosphere is unsteady at the magnifications being used, which is not as big an issue when photographing cave passages, but it might filter out dust / water droplets on the images if that's an issue in certain areas. Might give it a go next time I'm underground with a camera.

It that the technique Tony was referring to above?

 

[ZombieCake]

Some quick fakery.

Fakery is a disease that is most unwarranted.  It discredits everyone and calls everything into disrepute. 

 

[NewStuff]

Nothing at all to do with photography. Just using some algorithm or database to make stupid snowflakes think they can take photos.  All so artificial and utterly pointless.  If you want to take a photo, take a photo. Might be OK, might not, all part of the process.
The computer has taken the photo, you haven't.  An analogy: You are not a racing driver the Play Station is.
RAW, Photoshop, Lightroom, has a lot to do with imaging: photography is less clear.

No, sorry, have to disagree.

It's a tool, in the same way dodging and burning was when printing your own pictures from film you developed. You could (and still can) make a small tweak to exposure, or you can make a composite image with no basis in reality. Only the tools are changing.

In the same way Levels, Unsharp mask, and the clone tool are in most decent editing packages.

Photography is clearer than it ever was.

 

[ZombieCake]

We'll actually probably sort of to agree to disagree a bit. Load up what you want but make original negatives, JPEGS, RAW accessible too. I'm sure everyone can live with that.

 

[NewStuff]

I think you would have to be a bit carefree to be working from originals. My workflow has a script that checks SD cards on insertion and pulls new images to a backup drive, then does the same again from the backup drive to a working drive. But I saw a lot of people lose masses of work, so all of that is before my normal backups/snapshots/disk imaging.

Now, chances of me ever handing someone without a warrant an untouched original? Slim to none.

 

[tony from suffolk]

Quite right NewStuff. Surely people cannot believe any published photo nowadays isn't extensively digitally manipulated? I see no problem with what can be a very creative editing process. It's also damn good fun! What the camera captures is pretty detached from reality anyway - try printing out a camera's RAW image. Not particularly interesting, is it?

 

[andrewmcleod]

The camera is not the eye.

 

[pwhole]

Shooting in RAW (if your camera permits it) is the single most important in-camera setting to use, as it's a 12-bit format, as opposed to 8-bit, which is the limit most graphics cards and monitors can display. This means that instead of 256 levels of brightness between black and white (as defined in the three RGB channels), there are 4096 (I think!). So instead of 16.7 million potential colours available there are 68.7 billion. Obviously a monitor has a fixed number of pixels it can display, but it's a much bigger palette to choose from, so much better quality in terms of tonal and colour rendition, especially in high-contrast scenes. My Dell monitor claims to be 10-bit, but I think it needs a much posher graphics card to make much obvious difference.

When I did B/W photography, I used to under-rate Kodak Tri-X to 320 ISO instead of 400, thereby over-exposing it, and then developing in Rodinal at a much lower dilution and for much longer than the standard. It produced an amazing improvement in tonal rendition, especially in the shadows and highlights. Developing prints in very, very weak developer for much longer times and then finishing off in a normal bath for a (very) short time then improved the tonal rendition in the print as well. If it was large-format, on good-quality fibre paper, the results were stunning, and even 35mm was brilliant, as Rodinal produces very sharp edges on the silver crystals, so it looks 'sharp' even when it's obviously grainy. Those were the days.

But shooting in RAW and then processing via a proper RAW application into 8-bit is pretty much the digital equivalent of the above.

 

[Tommy]

I just found these style transfer shots I generated a little while ago.

 

[pwhole]

Nice. Like 1920s Russian posters. Is that those big limekilns?

 

[Tommy]

Sheffield