Pushing the Limits

 

Above is the only picture I have for my 2nd great grandparents Ira and Maria when they were young. I have a picture or two near the end of their life that are actual photos. The one above is merely a facsimile of a photo that is on one of the pages of a family history book that was given to my grandmother and I eventually inherited.  I don't recall if it credits who has the original photo because it has been a couple decades since I read through it last but I'm pretty sure even if it did, it would be a time consuming task to track down if it exists today and who has it. 

So based upon this information and my last experiment using A.I. to fix old photographs, I thought I would try it on this facsimile and see what happens. I loaded up the picture and gave the following command to Nano Banana Pro in Google Gemini: restore and increase resolution.

I am just gobsmacked at this result. It didn't remove the "tape" or whatever is across the top but other than that, it appears to be a very accurate rendition of the previous photo I had. I wish I had baby pictures of my great grandmother Amanda, the baby in this photo, to compare with but don't own any. The earliest picture of I have of her, she is probably already 25 to 30 years old. 

I decided to push the boundary a bit further and told Nano Banana Pro to: add color

While it did indeed add color, I see it took liberties with the background by removing furniture and adding a window. The flooring was also changed to a wooden floor over a carpeted area. To me, these liberties were too far and I could probably with enough attempts, get it to just add color without all the rest of the changes, but I think the picture looses all sense of time with the color, removal of the taped area and squaring of the corners. My first attempt definitely looks more authentic.

I would love to use the A.I. picture (middle one in this post) to attach to my family tree instead of the cropped grainy image I have from the "original" facsimile of a photo I have now but probably won't. It would quickly be copied by other genealogists on the platform, who either don't have pictures or are using the one I attached to my tree, and I feel that is pushing the ethics boundary a bit too far. But I think I will still keep the photo and stick it into my digital research folder along with the facsimile version with a notation that it was altered by A.I. just so I have a picture to look at and ponder.