Free, Open-Source AI Tool Repairs Old Photos Of Relatives Instantly

Most photos today don’t succumb to the wrath of time. You could be looking at a picture from 20 years ago and it’d still have its full color, since it’s most likely stored digitally. Of course, those in your old family albums aren’t so lucky.

Generative Facial Prior (GFP-GAN) is just one of numerous photo restoration tools that have made their way online, but it does the job remarkably and—even better—it’s open-source and free for all to use.

Created by researchers at the Tencent Applied Research Center, the app is able to bring definition to old, low-resolution photos of loved ones, removing their flaws and sharpening them to appear closer to portraits of today. All it takes is a simple upload, and the results are almost instantaneous.

GFP-GAN was recently commended by artificial intelligence expert Louis Bouchard of YouTube channel What’s AI (via PetaPixel), who detailed that the free tool seems to work more impressively than others of its ilk. In fact, the latest version of GFP-GAN is also pretty astute at guessing missing details in photos and adding pixels to them for a more complete look.

There are, of course, some limitations to what the AI app can do. Sometimes, it can use its imagination too much and throw in guesses that may not be historically accurate, especially with very old and damaged portraits. As a result, the subjects in your photos could end up looking different from your relatives.

Photoshop itself plans to roll out its own version of a one-click restoration tool. Demonstrated back in June, the ‘Photo Restoration’ feature wipes out age-related imperfections from scans of historical photos, lifting the burden of manual retouching.

You can try out GFP-GAN for yourself here.

[via PetaPixel, What’s AI, Tencent, images via Tencent (Apache 2.0 License)]