A few weeks ago I did a little test with an old coloured slide to see what happens when I used an AI-driven online recolouring service. (See the blog entry for 7 January.) It was very interesting, but it was unclear how it was achieved. For example, was it just a recolouring through an intensification of colour saturation with nothing more complex than what is available with almost any image editor. So, I tried a second time, using a scan of an old black and white photograph. In other words, there was no chance of any residual colour. And these are the amazing results.
Each would be acceptable on their own. The Base Palette was good, though the grass appears a little green, and the horse is of diverse colours. Given that the cart appears to be a hay wagon, one could speculate it to be autumnal, and therefore the grass would be browner than shown top right, though maybe not as much as the bottom row.
Note how the colour of the waistcoat (blue in the bottom right), changes significantly.
It is easy to marvel at the powers of AI in “enhancing images” creating something based on generalised assumptions for which you cannot be sure what is “the truth”. But is this really so different from the removal of people from Soviet political images during the Stalin era? Who can truly stand up and say what is the truth? And lets be clear, it will not be getting clearer as time goes by.
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