AI Upscaled Textures

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King of Worms
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by King of Worms »

I know this is a bit of offtopic, but I must... so I have some very old photos which are dear to me, and they are in very bad quality. I wonder what a proper AI could do to them? Anyone up for trying their algo on it? Or direct me to some SW which a noob like me cant use to try to make these look better?

Here are just 3 different photos, but I have many more. Its from 1996-7 from my raving times ;)

Thank you :)
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bits_n_giggles
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by bits_n_giggles »

The electronic music scene in the UK in the 90s (I'm assuming you're from, due to prior usage of 'flat' for 'home', I may be wrong) pioneered modern electronic music fests. Events like IMF in the states might not exist without the rave days of the 90s kids, pretty cool to see the lead of DREAM was there.

Been stupid busy since my last post (and will be for a while) but if someone doesn't get to it before me, I'll see if I can hook up an improvement or two and post them back here.

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King of Worms
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by King of Worms »

Czech republic 😊 the culture got here since it was basically banned in UK. The travelers and most notably Spiral Tribe left UK and went to europe and here they traveled East - my post communistic country was their last stop around the year 1994. It provided a lot of abandoned military places, airfields and even whole cities after the occupants left their bases. So we gave these places a new and brief usage... best times for me 😊 dancing till the sun starts to rise and on and on, those were the real rituals and freedom for me ✌

No worries about the photos, when/if u have time and feel like it, test some algo on it. If u find anything fitting, I can send u a batch to process (if that can be easily automated - I dont want to bother you with it)

I managed to instal the CupScale - that allows me to finally use AI upscale again, since my old pipeline stopped working. So I will do some tests on my own as well.

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Daniel87
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by Daniel87 »

King of Worms wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:59 am Czech republic 😊 the culture got here since it was basically banned in UK. The travelers and most notably Spiral Tribe left UK and went to europe and here they traveled East - my post communistic country was their last stop around the year 1994. It provided a lot of abandoned military places, airfields and even whole cities after the occupants left their bases. So we gave these places a new and brief usage... best times for me 😊 dancing till the sun starts to rise and on and on, those were the real rituals and freedom for me ✌

No worries about the photos, when/if u have time and feel like it, test some algo on it. If u find anything fitting, I can send u a batch to process (if that can be easily automated - I dont want to bother you with it)

I managed to instal the CupScale - that allows me to finally use AI upscale again, since my old pipeline stopped working. So I will do some tests on my own as well.
Wow these pictures bring back memories from my GOA times in Thailand and India as well as Germany and Switzerland :D
Now I'm a lazy freelancer spending 14+ hours in front of my PC while outside the tropical sun of Taiwan tries to lure me away from the screen.
Life goes interesting paths sometimes...
In Julianos we Trust.

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King of Worms
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by King of Worms »

Sounds good to me :) Yeah well Ive moved on as well, these parties were in 1997 and I was active psychonaut for lets say 10 years but after the year 2000 much less. The 90s era was magical for me there 8-) Now Im kind of boring on the outside, with crazy memories which Im glad only I remember and nobody can see. Still I have rebelious tendencies and sometimes I look backward and consider it better times, present being boring compared to that. Thats a burden and blessing at once.

Ive experimented with AI on these photos, and using "1x_Saiyajin_Dejpeg_300000_G" which basically just removes JPG artifacts and restores the image gave me the best results. Ive than tried to apply other AI algos upon that cleaned image, but it started to look weird, eventho some of those gave very interesting results. But it started to branch away from the original reality captured on the image, kind of resembling certain states of mind I might have witnessed in those times :lol:

Well since this is a texture upscaling thread, I will post the results, they are really good in this particular set of photos.
Extract, sort by name. Open in fullscreen and go right. There will be original 1 and next 1 is AI cleaned using the above mentioned algo - so u can compare. It really did extraordinary well IMO. Not only it removed the artifacts, it also reconstructed the image in many cases but in a realistic way, not adding the AI "guesswork" and not removing any details. The skilled eye of person who can see the differences of the AI processing will be pleased of the technical aspects IMHO. Plus you will see a really strange party :D

https://easyupload.io/klhkui

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ragholio
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by ragholio »

Photo restoration is a hobby of mine. I have a proprietary method that used several layers of machine learning and manual work. Unfortunately there's not a lot of data to go on in these super low res files, so the results may be a little unrealistic. But let me know what you think anyway:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CGJ-jy ... sp=sharing

Greetings from sunny Poruba, Ostrava.

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King of Worms
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by King of Worms »

Ahoj from Prague, I hope you dont hate me now :lol:

That image looks really great, the face and colors, crazy good! Its like it was taken yesterday. The faces in background not so much, but those were out of focus anyway so the AI went a bit crazy there. I did not realize the colors were so off in the original. How long you worked on that image? Do you have some automatic pipeline thru which we can squeeze the images so they look like this? :ugeek: Even if its just the color correction pass...

Thank you!

Comparison screen Ive made so others can see if they interrested, if you zoom further in on eyes etc, it kind of incredible how detailed and clean it got
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ragholio
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by ragholio »

Your welcome :) Nah, I don't hate you as I'm not really and Ostravak. I'm technically a Makovak (Makov near Litomysl) as that's where my wife is from. I'm actually from Mullumbimby in Australia originally. :D

First pass: The process is a little difficult to streamline or automate unfortunately. The reason why the face looks more detailed than the rest of the image is because it uses a GAN (generative adversarial network), which is trained specifically on faces. It can have amazing results or very occasionally creates a hideous hellspawn abomination. It requires feeding the image into an app called Remini which is payware (though you get 5 free image processes per day in the free version). It's the most fiddly bit, because you need to either copy the image to your phone, process it, then copy it back to your pc, or use an android emulator (bluestacks in my case) and import the file from windows, process it, then export it back to windows.

Second Pass: This is easy, feed the image into Topaz Gigapixel AI and upscale it to the desired resolution. Unfortunately its not free.

Third pass: Also easy. Feed the image into Topaz Denoise AI for denoising and sharpening. Also not free.

4th pass: Feed the image into Adobe Camera Raw and adjust the tonality, colours, shadows/highlights, white balance etc. to taste. And do a little manual cleanup of dust spots or other anomalies in Photoshop with the spot healing brush.

So it takes around 20-30 minutes per image unfortunately.

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emmathepony
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by emmathepony »

Dude those realistic faces from a few pages back had my eyes hanging off my face!!! :geek:

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ByteMixer
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Re: AI Upscaled Textures

Post by ByteMixer »

Prague was nice, at least the parts of it we saw during the 3 days we spent there in 2009. Though IIRC, the temperature was something like -9 C while we were there. My wife's grandparents funded our honeymoon, which was a Viking cruise up the Danube starting with a 3-day pre-cruise excursion in Vienna with a few guided tours, ending with a 3 days post-cruise excursion in Prague. On the way up, we toured Melk, Linz, Passau, Regensberg, and finally Nuremberg before getting on a bus to Prague. I can definitely say I have a fondness for sacher torte.

IIRC, we went flew over around December 13th around when all the Christmas markets are popping up all over the place.

As you can imagine, Vienna, at least the old city and the Zentralfriedhof are particularly important to me as a musician, composer and songwriter :D
Hard to believe it's already been almost 12 years.

Also, that photo restoration is really incredible. Amazing to see what several passes of AI + other techniques can do to an old image.
"Whatever you do, make good art." - Neil Gaiman

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