Dostoevsky, 1879 — AI restoration, not reconstruction, with Stable Diffusion
Description of workflow by u/FotoRe_store
I set myself two tasks: firstly to make as close to the original as possible (restoration, not reconstruction), and secondly to make the texture of the skin of the face as realistic as possible.
The work took a little more than two days.
The first day:
- searching and systematizing the memories of Dostoevsky's contemporaries about his appearance in the period when the original photo was taken;
- search for earlier variants of colorization of this photo;
- searching for and studying other images of the writer;
- then it is necessary to "sleep with" the knowledge gained.
Day two:
- I make several variants of colorization and facial detailing on different free sites, which I mix among themselves and with earlier colorizations from other authors;
- a bit of playing with upscalers in Stable Diffusion;
- a lot of intermediate and final gluing, mixing and finishing in Gimp;
- a lot of inpaint of separate image pieces in Stable Diffusion (more than a thousand generations), with and without controlnet (lineart_anime).
The last item is the main one and took about 80% of the effort.
And yes, the hardest part of this kind of detailed restoration is not pulling valid information out of the noise with diffusion neural networks. The hardest part is evaluating the extracted information against the inferred information. And so far only the human brain can adequately make such an assessment. A computer cannot cope with such tasks (and it seems that it will not be able to cope for a long time).
In fact, the working process is something like assembling a puzzle from a thousand pieces of the same shade based on a vague picture of the original, which is (and constantly slips away) only in the mind of the person assembling it.
prompt: RAW photo, photoportrait of 59yo male man, [gray | brown] eyes, light [ginger | brown | ginger] (gray-streaked:1.2) hair, a wart on right cheek, thin pale lips, earthy complexion, sickly appearance, (long:1.3) scruffy ungroomed ginger beard, swamp-colored drape jacket, (detailed facial features), (sharp focus:1.3), (high detailed skin:1.2), ((detailed face)), ultra high res, hdr, hyperdetailed
negative: anime, 3d, render, cartoon, paint, mult, (deformed, distorted, disfigured:1.3), poorly drawn, bad anatomy, wrong anatomy, mutation, mutated, ugly, disgusting, blurry, obese
model: Realistic_Vision_v5
ALT Dostoevsky, 1879