Another attempt at restoring and colorizing a photo using Adobe Firefly, this time using a copy of a photo of my grandfather, made from an original sent to me by a cousin several years ago. This is also the photo I used for reference when restoring the photo of my grandfather in his baseball uniform to recreate his face which was damaged in the original.
As can be seen, there are quite a few scratches on the surface of the photo, but his face is reasonably intact. I made a previous restoration of the photo without colorizing it which mostly fixed the damage to it, but wasn’t perfect.
For the next version, I instructed Firefly to colorize the photo, and supplied hair and eye color from his World War I draft paperwork, which identifies his hair as “dark” and eyes as “grey”. The result handled adding color but retained much of the damage. It also made a best guess on the color of the tie.
The next prompt was to repair the image and colorize it and this yielded better results. It even completed the oval surrounding the picture, which was cut off on the original.
I recalled that he had more of an olive complexion, so I added this to the instructions to Firefly, which yielded a more realistic portrait but altered the color of his jacket, changed the tie, and added a tie bar. Also, the fountain pen was missing.
I added the previous photo as a prompt and told Firefly to switch out the necktie and add the fountain pen, which yielded a reasonable rendering that also matches his expression in the original.
I’m satisfied with the results and I may be getting the hang of crafting prompts, since this job did not generate as many photos as the original one in his baseball uniform.
I also colorized the picture of him in his Navy uniform. He wasn’t in the service for very long.
I took another pass at the Navy photo, adding the detail about his complexion and that yielded this final image.
