Restoring Photos With AI

Many of us have old photos tucked away in albums and they are often tiny, faded and have blurry details. AI Art tools can help you to restore and enlarge nostalgic old images for today’s digital age.

In fact, one of the original uses of AI in imaging was to do “upscaling”, converting low resolution, pixelated images to larger and cleaner images. There are many online apps that allow you to do this, but you often have to pay a fee.

Now, open-source AI tools like Stable Diffusion allow you to do upscaling and restoration for free. I’ve been upscaling different images of people and buildings to test its capabilities. But given that AI doesn’t know what you want, it can take a lot of trial and error to achieve the desired image.

I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who want to restore old family photos or historical images, and I’ve already helped people transform their passport photos into a nice painterly portraits.

Image restoration is one of the topics I will cover in my first AI Art workshop that is happening tomorrow at a local design firm. I’m excited to see what the participants do with this capability, among many other features of generative AI art tools!


I help people grow through words, visuals and technology. See more on my ThinkTan website (link in comments)

(Original photo of Victoria Memorial Hall from 1970, from Yan Biao Boey, found on Flickr)