A short thread on today's featured photo, how it got to where it is, and things to look at... Firstly, the sources: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:In_gpo_rising.jpg

There are two copies of the photo here, a cropped but higher resolution one, and a non-cropped one which looks to be an @nlireland copy 1/

We used DeOldify to colourise both, and then enhanced the faces... There are different tools to enhance faces: Topaz Gigapixel AI, Remini, StyleGAN-custom solutions. They work well for low-res or sometimes blurry photos, with a good amount of detail. They don't work so well... 2/

...if the photo/face is damaged (as it interpolates this damage as part of the enhanced face), if the quality is so poor that the enhanced result is warped or looks nothing like the original person. But they can give good results. We took the cropped version as it looked best. 3/

In this one, more of the faces seemed real. But in retrospect, we could have taken some of the better faces from the non-cropped one and used them on the cropped. Next time! Here are two images: on the left is the cropped version, and on the right is the non-cropped one (NLI). 4/

Then comes the hard work: manual fixes in Photoshop, and even some research! We look for the uniform colours: not just the materials, but the colours of the buttons, the leather parts, etc. We rely on online photos, museum archives, and guidance from experts, and try our best. 5/

This doesn't show all changes because sometimes we're lazy (no new layer), and make edits directly to the layers. Even after finalising, you spot stuff: "should haves". Some potential improvements became obvious when going back to the sources, labelled here. That's it for now! 6/

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