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Use This Free Tool to Restore Faces in Old Family Photos

5 Sep 2022 4:21 PM | Anonymous

This online tool—called GFPGAN—first made it onto our radar when it was featured in the August 28 edition of the (excellent) Recomendo newsletter, specifically, a post by Kevin Kelly. In it, he says that he uses this free program to restore his own old family photos, noting that it focuses solely on the faces of those pictured, and “works pretty well, sometimes perfectly, in color and black and white.”

The tool is incredibly easy to use. If you are accessing GFPGAN on your phone, you have the option of selecting a photo from your library, or taking a new photo to use. When we accessed the page on a laptop, the only option was choosing a file from your computer.

Anyway, once you upload the photo, tap or click the green “Restore photo” button, and then wait for the final product. While the results aren’t instant, the restoring process takes roughly 15 to 20 seconds.

You can read all about this useful piece of software in an article by Elizabeth Yuko published in the lifehacker web site at: https://bit.ly/3qbPHeH

Comments

  • 6 Sep 2022 7:32 AM | Anonymous
    It appears that one must upload photos to be processed, and It isn't clear what else might happen to uploaded photos. What are the privacy implications?
    Link  •  Reply
    • 6 Sep 2022 2:51 PM | Anonymous
      Rather amazing restoration process. I tried three different photos and got impressive results although the "restoration" one very poor quality photo was a little excessive. I downloaded one of the restored files and the ".png" file was considerably larger than the ".jpg" file I uploaded but not a problem.
      Restored photos appear "restored" while some restoration programs produce images that are obviously reconstructed rather than being restored.
      Link  •  Reply

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