You discovered an previous household photograph. It’s light and scratched. It seems to be prefer it survived a minor flood. But is it toast? Not anymore.
The excellent news: ChatGPT and Google Gemini can now colorize and gently restore previous images in seconds. No Photoshop, plugins, or PhD required.
Bad information: in case you’re sloppy, the mannequin will fortunately “improve” your kin into individuals you don’t acknowledge. The secret is cautious restraint.
Here’s how you can do it proper.
Step 1: Give the AI one thing value working with
Visit your mother and father and discover that musty shoebox filled with mid-20th century images. It’s essential to begin with the perfect enter attainable.
If you will have entry, scan them at 300-600 DPI. If you don’t have a scanner, a transparent, straight-on, glare-free photograph will just do advantageous. (This is what we did for the pictures you see noticed above).
You don’t want perfection. But readability issues. Garbage in nonetheless will get you… barely higher rubbish out.
Step 2: Add a couple of minor constraints
You’re asking the mannequin to revive, not reinvent. Use a constraint-first immediate like this (copy / paste):
Skip this, and the mannequin will confidently ship you an alternate-universe household.
Step 3: Iterate (subtlety at all times wins right here)
First move too intense? Say so.
- “Reduce saturation by ~10% and soften sharpening.”
- “Restore texture and grain, especially on faces.”
- “Avoid smooth or plasticky skin.”
The objective is to softly tweak your picture, with out transforming the photograph’s content material.
A fast Gemini-specific tip
Gemini behaves finest with additional guardrails:
- Explicitly say don’t change faces, framing, or background.
- Call out hallucinations immediately—it often corrects itself.
This course of works surprisingly properly. It can do it with fewer prompts than the one above, however having some minor constraints appeared to extend the standard a bit extra. With ChatGPT Image (OpenAI’s newest picture mannequin), I didn’t spot any awkward artifacting or weird coloration selections.
You will discover within the picture of the person and boy within the boat that there’s an odd spot across the lifejacket between the 2 topics. However, within the unique picture, that vivid spot was current, so it’s probably the mannequin didn’t have sufficient information in that area and needed to interpret it.
Once you’ve performed a couple of of those, share them with your loved ones and blow their minds. They’ll suppose you’re a wizard.
Editor’s observe: This content material initially ran within the publication of our sister publication, The Neuron. To learn extra from The Neuron, join its publication right here.
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