This winter I have been going through a lot of old photos to keep myself occupied. The winters are long for me, and I hate to go out or drive in the cold weather. I don't need to go out to stores and buy more stuff my children won't want. I don't want to go out to eat alone when I have plenty of food in the house for a meal. Now that it is March, we begin baby steps toward spring. Every few days we get a warm day to give us hope.
I wanted to share something I discovered. Many of my old pictures are of people I don't know, but those I can identify I want to save. I am trying to identify as many as I can. Some of them are very old and a few were written on. They had the date and sometimes who was in the photo. That is very helpful. Some have been stashed in a box for a long time and have gotten bent or folded in half. I have posted the repaired copies of some of these photos but I want to show you some of the originals and how I fixed them.
The first is a picture of Agnes. It is a picture from my previous blog (https://www.thecabincountess.com/2026/02/agnes.html. The picture had a big crease across the middle and was rather dark.
This is the corrected version. It is much clearer and the white crease line is gone.
Next is a school picture from the same blog. It is a group shot and came from an old magazine. It is pretty faded so I crisped it up. Then just for the fun of it, I colorized it. I am not sure if the colors are correct but this is how it came out.
This next picture had faded over the years so I just asked to brighten it up. It is of my Aunt Aggie and my grandpa Holger. He always had a pipe.
Here is another of myself, my uncle Jeff and neighbor Wendy. Somehow this photo got folded in half damaging it. I asked to take the crease out. I didn't ask to clean it up and make it clearer, but I bet it would have.
All this sounds impressive, but it wasn't me. It was AI or Artificial Intelligence. That dirty word that everyone is worried about, me included. If it were only for repairing old photos and giving google like information it would be fine, but it is very sophisticated. We probably shouldn't believe anything we see anymore unless we see it with our own eyes. I won't go into to the pros and cons of AI here. It is too complicated for my brain.
There is an application called ChatGPT. It is the one I used. There are probably more that do the same thing. This one is free. You can go to the app store and download it to your phone. When you click on the app you can ask it anything. In this case I asked to take the crease out of the first and last photo. There is a plus (+) button on the left side. Click on it and you can add a photo from your phone or get a report on something or ask for a recipe. The second photo I asked to crisp up and then the next to colorize it. If the photo is quite bad and some of the face is blocked out, they create a similar face. In some cases, it isn't quite right and it doesn't look exactly like the subject. It isn't perfect, but I suspect there will be improvements everyday. Mostly it is quite amazing.
This is an example of faces not being exact sometimes. This is a school picture where my Aunt Bernice was the teacher. The original isn't clear and from my memory of her, the corrected version of her face isn't quite right. Of course I didn't know her then. This photo was before I was born. It could be spot on and who knows what the children really looked like. I doubt if anyone is alive who would remember so it's a lot better than no pictures at all.
It is very hard to keep up with technology. It is changing all the time. In this case, I was just happy to be able to salvage some of my pictures.
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