Photo Editing - A Tale in Three Pictures

 In the great digitization of all my family photos I came across this image.

 The story is that the boy in the picture was mad one day and he tore, crumpled, and poked holes in the picture. It was saved anyway because there not many pictures and you could still see the image.

I worked on it in GIMP, because Photoshop costs too much for how often I would use it, and managed, despite my woeful lack of skills, to get it looking like this.

  

 

This is how I put it in the archive I created, alongside the original. 

 

Recently, I read an article on using AI to repair damaged photos and thought of this image, so I gave it a try. The image I uploaded was this second image, the one I had labored over for a couple of hours. What I got back in about 90 seconds was this.

 

 

 

 

There's valid concerns about where all of this is going, and so much of the AI generated stuff on FB and YouTube is terrible, but this is amazing. I have a handful of pictures I scanned and saved because they seemed important to the family story in some way but are damaged, faded, or in need of color balancing. I'm hoping for more results like this.