The power of AI-based photo processing

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Luver

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2015
Messages
79
Location
Padova, Italy
Hello, I just posted in the Completed Figures forum the pictures of my latest work Knight XIVc by Pegaso Models .

Referring to this, in this post I wanted to share with you an experiment I did while I was processing the pictures I took to the figurine.
My typical workflow includes the following steps: shooting (of course...) in RAW, processing of RAW file, conversion into JPG and resize the JPG for web publishing.
To process RAW images, I recently started woking with the program Luminar Neo AI by Skylum
Differently from other photo processing programs, Luminar New makes and extensive use of AI algorithms to process the images and build specific effects.
Some effects are common like sharpening and noise reduction, but there are other that are more sophisticated. One of them is called "upscale" which improves the resolution of the image, but it's one option to improve the face details.
Now, in general, in my photo processing approach I only use minor corrections since a faithful representation is key to me and the photos in the referenced post are of this type.
Just for testing, I decided to click the option of improve the face and... I was really shocked by the outcome. Take a look at the attached photo. To me it's incredible, the AI algorithm also created the bard hairs!
Of course this image is fake and I would never use for publishing, but I wanted to share with you this finding.
Luciano


Knight-Face-AI.jpg
 

It is! And this is exactly what I thought...
I was wondering if some painters are using techniques like this to improve the appearance of their paint jobs.
With the program I use, this is an all or nothing effect. Maybe other programs support a progressive effect so that the improvement can be more realistic and less dramatic.
If the effect was more realistic, probably nobody would detect it much
In my test, the skin might be okay from a pictorial point of view, while the beard hair and eyes are definitely too realistic and hard to believe that they are painted.
Luciano
 
And just you wait. This effect will eventually be possible in 3D too. I can well imagine AI input to 3D printing that uses a library of thousands of 3D scanned beards and hairstyles, for example. That will inevitably come, along with photo-realistic, in-scale, 3D texturing. Smearing on coloured liquid with actual brushes will then seem as quaint and archaic as flint-knapping.
 
"Smearing on colored liquid with actual brushes..." Sounds like an insult to those of us who enjoy that. Replacing art with technology. Not around my desk.


I fully agree with you!
This is why, when I retouch photos, I only apply minimal changes to overcome the limitations of technology like the sensor sensitivity, noise, aliasing, etc.
IMO the photo should mirror the reality as most as possible, that's it!
My test was just an experiment, to see what the effect looked like, but I would never use it to document my paint jobs.
It would not make sense

Luciano
 
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