Ask any serious photographer what they think of ‘artificial Intelligence’ and what it means to photography and you are opening yourself up to a flood of various, sometimes nasty, opinions.
AI photography is computer generated images in which the ‘creator’ submits a request of a computer to generate an image. The image sometimes conforms to what the requester asks. We will leave it at that.
How does the AI learn to ‘generate’ the image?
The AI is shown thousands, millions of images that have legitimately or otherwise been presented to the AI system. The system reviews each image looking for shapes, familiar or not and labels and catalogues them.
When the requester asks for this element or concept, the AI searches its catalogue and selects concepts of images that you are requesting and tries to create an image with them.
The resulting image might contains a bit of someone’s painting, someone else’s photograph, composition from yet another source, and so on. It is original yet is created by bits and pieces of many people’s work. And that is why photo contests frown upon them.
Personally, in the commercial realm, I have no objections to computer help in ‘creating’ work, however, I would rather be solely credited for my creative work.
However, there are areas of personal and commercial photography where i have no objections to using tools to assist me. Retouching my photos is one.
High quality photo retouching has always been an appreciated area of expertise, and to me, I can always appreciate the help. I will be showing you a few examples of retouching some old family photos using the latest Photoshop Beta.
A simple colour restoration. My grandmother about 1966. Yes, I could restore it by placing a colour overlay layer on it and then adjusting the curves to manipulate the colours. But, a simple line of text got Photoshop to restore the colour and clean up some of the 60 years of handling.
A photo of me with my parents, 70+ years ago.
Repair, restore, color correct was all the instructions given to Photoshop.
I would suggest US spellings lest Photoshop not understand.
So, what’s happening? I am supplying Photoshop with the image, some rudimentary instructions and AI is doing the rest.
The AI is assuming skin colours, guessing at appropriate clothing colours and judging by the shadows putting in a sunny sky.
And if you want to colourize a photo? The old way in Photoshop was a bit of work, and the even older way of hand colouring using Marshal Transparent Photo Oils was even more work.
Using AI, this 1950 photo was quickly sharpened, enlarged and given a reasonable colouring.
The samples I have shown were done in the current Photoshop Beta using Nano Banana.
Select the area you want to work on, I used select all, and Click on Generative Fill and then click on Gemini 3. Write out what you want done. I wrote repair, restore, color correct and then click generate.
I quite like the few items I did. What did I not like? To do more than a few AI images, you need to buy a monthly plan. It’s not a lot of money but I would never use up even the monthly minimum. I wish I could just buy, say 100 images and use it over time.
