Nano Banana

 

After my recent post about using A.I. to edit a photo to replace humans with goats, it got me thinking about the possibility of using A.I. to restore some of my favorite genealogy photos. However, before I could attempt one, my blogging Canadian friend AC did exactly that and also using the same A.I. that I had used for the goat trail photo called Nano Banana Pro which is linked through Google's Gemini A.I. Seeing his success, made me sit down and make the time to restore a photo and the one I chose is the one above. 

It is an inherited photo from my grandparents taken when they were dating. When I received it, it has been folded a bit causing the broken white lines across the upper portions of the photo but was in fair shape overall. Above is the result that I obtained after scanning it using my flatbed scanner and doing some minor altering such as cropping off the photo edges and adjusting the contrast a bit. So I uploaded it to Gemini and per AC's post, simply typed in the word "Restore" and hit enter.

As you can see, it removed those white lines perfectly to my eyes and looks great though I see it added some sort of watermark in the lower right hand corner, I suppose to indicate that it had been altered. I didn't see the same watermark on AC's picture so I'm not sure yet why I have one.

But I thought while I was using A.I. to restore a photo, I might as well see what else I could do with the photo so I asked it next to remove the wire shadow line across the siding behind my grandmother's back.

Again, Gemini had no problem doing that. So I thought, why not see if it could take care of all the reflections in the windows.

It also was able to do that and added some curtains to boot which I found less distracting than all the previous reflections but I noticed that it put the wire shadow back into the photograph. So for my fourth and final attempt at it turned out, I asked it to remove the wire shadow again.

Nano Banana Pro through Google's Gemini did as I asked and I think the net result, even with the added watermark, is quite nice and an "improvement" on the original photo. It focuses all the attention on the stars of the photo, my grandparents, and removes all the distractions. I will save the final version in my folder that contains my original scanned version and append the filename to say it was modified using A.I. I'm still not sure of the ethics of saving and potentially passing on photos that have been altered in content, even if just subtracting distracting things, that might allow future generations to believe it to believe it unaltered.

As AC discovered and for the second time, I discovered, I am only allowed four attempts using Nano Banana Pro per day. I can use the default cheaper editing method labeled only as "fast" which says it is using Nano Banana but leaves out the "Pro" label part and indeed it does things much faster with each photo iteration taking maybe 5 seconds versus a minute or two for the Pro treatment.

Below is the best I could do after four iterations using only the fast option. Again it allowed me to remove the folding marks above though it took two iterations to do it completely and it also removed the wire shadow mark across the siding. Despite asking it to remove the reflections and objects in the window panes, it seemed unable to do so. 

But since I have unlimited options (at least I never reached a limit), I asked it to remove the watermark in the lower right hand corner. It flat out refused saying it would likely infringe upon copyright issues. Seeing as I own the original, I asked it to remove the four pointed star in the lower right corner thinking that perhaps the word "watermark" was the issue but again it refused for the same reason. 

On a related note, I did click the button to see what a subscription would cost and it as $20/month to have unlimited access to Nano Banana Pro and other features it has. Since I am not likely to do very many such restorations and haven't mentally dealt with the ethics part of it, I am not likely to subscribe anytime soon. But for those who don't have the ethics issues I am hung up on, I can see them putting costlier subscription packages for photo editing software out of business really soon. I have a free software called GIMP that go likely do what a professional paid for software can do but I have struggled to learn it. But if I can type into A.I. plain English commands to edit a photo how I want, I'm not sure I'll take the time to learn any photo editing software anymore.