AI in post-processing

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Ludwig

In a number of posts I have disparaged AI, even made fun of it. But all is not bad. In more tightly applied applications, AI has proven quite capable. Recently my OneDrive dug up a reminder of some old phots from 2012. Those photos were downsized to 1024 pixel. I wondered what some of the recent photo editing apps could do with them.

Here is an evening view of old and new taken at River Street in Savannah. The brighter image is the newly re-processed one, I wanted to get a good look into the shadows where the noise would be more prominent. Indeed the tools in PaintShop Pro, ON1 Photo RAW, Topaz Labs DeNoise and Gigapixel, are quite capable in filling in reconstructing detail, eliminating noise and enhancing images rather well.

Here is a screen capture of Topaz Gigapixel showing how it can reconstruct the rigging from rather pixelated detail.

For a long time I considered Topaz DeNoise AI as the best in smoothing out noise and reconstructing detail. The latest version of ON1 Photo RAW has me impressed with its capability. Here are small areas from one of my old photos with the default denoise settings in Topaz Denoise AI on top And ON1 Photo RAW MAX 2024.3

I even discovered interesting detail that I did not know was there. See the photographer in the lower right corner.

Two more images – just for old-time sake.

Moon over River Street
Ludwig Keck 2009

.:. © 2024 Ludwig Keck

Posted in artificial intelligence, Digital Photos, Photo Editing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

AI is not for me

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Ludwig

It is not something I do very often, but I did a free trial at an AI site. My thought was that paid AI might be better than the free versions. No, it wasn’t.

The hands are as mangled as in the free versions. In this example the face is rather poor, just look at the eye. I had not paid attention to the feet of people much in other AI images. Here AI clearly misses again.

What really surprised me was a recent search. AI seems to have crept into the search engines. It was a somewhat unusual business I searched for. To my surprise one popped up fairly close to home. I checked the address and could not find the business, so I called the number listed in the search result. It was not a working number. So search engines also “hallucinate”, making up fake results. That can really lead to trouble. When search engines become untrustworthy, we really have entered the twilight zone.

Of course, I will continue to check and see if progress is being made. I will skip searching for AI progress, however.

Addendum

After I published this post this popup came up:

WordPress has joined the AI bandwagon. What do you think of its tag recommendations?

.:. © 2024 Ludwig Keck

Posted in artificial intelligence, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

AI getting better

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Ludwig

That is my question, “Is AI getting better?” — Is progress being made? So, I tried three image generators with a very simple prompt:

“An artist working in her studio. She is at the easel, paintbrush in hand creating a gorgeous landscape painting.“

Here is wat I got – the images here are rescaled but otherwise just as they came from the AI generators.

Hands are a challenge and still a problem for AI. In the first image the generator side-stepped the issue and showed nothing of the hand. The second one really mangled the artists hand in “classic AI” style. It also managed to break up the paintbrush (?) into floating pieces. The third one almost gets it correctly, one hand is awkward, the other obscure. Faces are pretty good, but that has been the hallmark of artificial intelligence image generators.

Has progress been made? Well, all three got “she” and “her” correct. All show an easel, and all have a pretty nice landscape painting in the works. All are indoors, so even “studio” was interpreted correctly.

I will “hand” it to AI that it is a bit improved since last I tried it. But I also have to tell you that a fourth one begged off and did not produce any image at all – claiming to be working on improving its talents.

For now I will say “Watch this space”.

.:. © 2024 Ludwig Keck

Posted in art, artificial intelligence | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments