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These vintage photos show the timeless allure of travel

Find inspiration for your next journey in these images from National Geographic’s archives.

Since the founding of the National Geographic Society in 1888, our documentary work has taken inspiration from the world around us—from fragile ecosystems that demand conservation to monuments of civilization that tell the human story—to encourage people to look closer and care more about the planet.

Our goal is rooted in the belief that knowledge comes from curiosity. Established “for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge,” the Society quickly cultivated an audience with an appetite for adventure.  

But you don’t have to summit Everest to solve its greatest mystery or plumb the depths aboard the Calypso like Jacques Cousteau to embrace the mystery and beauty around us. All you need to do is step outside with an open mind, a desire to learn, and a willingness to ask questions. All storytellers are travelers, and all travelers can become storytellers.

Inspiration helps. Whether it comes from the first scientific expedition undertaken by the National Geographic Society in 1890, led by Israel Russell to survey and map the Mount St. Elias region in North America, or the groundbreaking work of Explorer-led expeditions today, boundary-pushing journeys can “illuminate and protect the wonder of our world,” as our motto reads .  

( What it’s like to travel through time in National Geographic’s archives. )

This spirit of exploration is fueled by our visual storytellers, who for more than a century have documented epic landscapes, microscopic life forms, and far-flung communities, as well as everyday sights made remarkable through their expert lens.  

National Geographic’s photographic archive counts more than 10 million images. Here are a few of our favorites. To be sure, they document the privilege of travel and the perspectives of past photographers. But they also capture the timeless inspiration, joy, and reward of exploring the world.

Subscribe here for full access to our archives, including National Geographic’s treasure trove of vintage photographs and articles.

This gallery was originally published on November 15, 2017. It has been updated.

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Crazy Pictures Of People Who Might Just Be Time Travelers

Would the discovery of modern people in old pictures be enough to convince the world, or even you, of the existence of time travel? If so, then you're about to find out for yourself as you get a load of the following photographs, which some people claim are actually old photos of time travelers who were accidentally caught on film. In other words, some may believe this is proof of time travel. Whether you believe these time travel photos are simple coincidences or eyebrow-raising evidence of the ability to chill in other eras is up to you, but along the way you'll get the chance to get a look at some pretty interesting pictures - images weird enough to make even the boldest skeptic take a second look. 

Among the following would-be time traveler pictures you'll see some evidence of modern technology being used long before it was invented. You'll also get the chance to pick a couple of folks in eerily modern clothing out of crowds of people who lived long ago and decide whether they were just super fashion-forward or travelers from another time altogether. 

So strap on your time-traveling seat belts and get ready for a creepily modern blast from the past as you check out what some claim is evidence of time travelers who accidentally got caught on film. After all, if these people could do it, maybe there's something to the idea? Maybe ?

Greta Thunberg's 19th Century Doppelganger

• University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
• Wikimedia Commons

The Guy Taking A Photo With His Phone In 1962

• Felipe Alvear
• CC-BY-SA 4.0

This Guy Talking On A Cell Phone Long Before They Were Invented

This Woman On A Cell Phone At The Premiere Of A Charlie Chaplin Film

This Time Portal Caught On A Security Camera

This iPhone-Wielding Time Traveler In A 17th Century Painting

• Pieter de Hooch
• Public Domain

This Photo Of A 'Time Traveler' Allegedly Taken During The Civil War

• Library of Congress
• No known restrictions on publication

A Guy Checking His Phone On The Beach In The 1940s

• @StuartHumphryes

A time-traveling tourist may have been spotted hanging out with beach-goers in Cornwall, England. In a photograph dated 1943, a man in a brown suit appears to be checking his phone in that all-too-familiar, hunched-over, squinty-eyed pose to which we all conform when checking those important playoff game scores and what our ex is up to on Instagram. Yet this was WWII-era - there were certainly no cell phones around. One skeptic surmised the bespoke man was probably just rolling a cigarette or something similar; regardless, he still looks a little odd in his dark suit, standing out among even the more modestly-dressed swimsuits of the day.

• Interesting
• Time Travel
• Optical Illusions

As they say in well-written scripts, "You mean... like time travel?" + also a few bizarre stories about real people who have claimed, despite every law of physics, they have traveled through time.

OLD-PICS.COM

A Time Traveller's Trove of Vintage Color Pics..

..from times long gone by, your vintage photo repository & archive, collaborative, multi-lingual, non-commercial.

OLD-PICS.COM is a community project based on the idea of an Online Photo Archiving, Management and Presentation Platform to preserve old photos. Otherwise vintage pics would fall into oblivion or get even irretrievably lost from physical destruction. We would like to make the most beautiful contemporary photographs of old bygone times available to the public.

Transforming analog film information into the digital realm not only rejuvenates our own personal recollections of the past. Digitizing Analog Film supports also preserving our cultural heritage when we save fading analog image information from complete destruction and share digital images with others:

Showcasing Color Vintage Pics

Dedicated for history buffs.

Learn about the collaborative, multi-lingual, non-commercial Character of this platform.

Become a Member and contributor of beautiful historic photos from your own collection:

Showcase your own Iconographic Color Historic Pics of the Past on this platform to an interested Audience of History Buffs! , while all copyrights remain with you.

Contribute to the conservation of historical cultural heritage and - at the same time - facilitate cross-cultural understanding.

See the world as you will never see it again any more and let yourself be captivated by Nostalgia and Reverie evoked by Vintage Photos in general.

Get details about the various technical methods to digitize analog film and slides and about image enhancement methods and procedures deploying Artificial Intelligence AI models on digital copies of vintage pics.

Cherish Old Photographs - They are Part of your Cultural Heritage

Unique iconographic vintage pics, ...that were handmade by your forefathers.

In distinction to today's mass-available photo pools with myriads of images that were fully automatically edited with automatic filters and electronic image effects, in the gone days Your parents and grandparents still handcrafted their photographs by carrying heavy equipment and manually adjusting the settings of the camera, before receiving a reflection of reality at that time.

Moreover in comparison with the past, we are today living in an era where the distinction between real and virtual images grows more and more hazier. Unique, rare and one-of-a-kind iconographic vintage photographs that can no longer be captured in today’s modern settings any more stand against artificially created images of today.

Images that can no longer be taken

..and that artificial intelligence cannot create.

At OLD-PICS.COM we safeguard those old images by not making them available for AI. By doing so we prevent Artificial Intelligence AI to learn from and create artificial photos induced by our photo inventory. Instead, those unique photos are preserved for future generations, highlighting their uniqueness and historical significance.

Mapping Your Memories on a Worldmap

Pinpoint photo locations on a world map, show places of your grandparents photo shootings.

Let Others See Your Great Vintage Color Pics and pinpoint the Places of your Grandparents Photo Shootings on a World Map. It’s a fascinating way to visualize where those moments occurred. You can use the online archive's geolocation function to display your photos on a world map, making it easy for interested viewers to assign old photos to their locations.

There is a World Map View with all photo locations on a world map for general illustration.

So, dust off those old films and slides, explore the past, and let the geolocation tools guide you on a journey through time and geography!

OLD-PICS.COM Mapping Tool

Change between esri satellite view and streetmap.

For precise locations, users can switch to a Open Street Map View, where even an address search can be initiated. Most digital photos store GPS info in metadata called EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). Geolocation can be embedded in digital image files by Photo Management Tools like Adobe Lightroom and others for adding GPS coordinates.

Contribute to the Preservation of Cultural Heritage

Showcase and preserve vintage photos @old-pics.com, ..and facilitate cross-cultural understanding.

By showcasing your own interesting Color Vintage Pics on this Online-Photo Repository you contribute to the conservation and appreciation of historical cultural heritage. At the same time you help facilitating cross-cultural understanding!

Exploring old photos is like opening a time capsule, revealing glimpses of the past. Whether it’s faded family snapshots or historical landmarks, these images connect us to bygone eras.

See in old photos where you are deriving from and discover cultural habits of your ethnic group again that were thought to be forgotten.

Read in the section Preservation of Heritage more about Cultural and Collective Memory that is embedded in Vintage Photos.

Your old images or slides hold your memories and secrets. They capture moments frozen in time, from family gatherings to iconic cityscapes.

It's always fascinating to see how places have changed over the decades - for better or for worse. You can also use photos to easily see how natural and cultural landscapes have changed.

Discover Your Cultural History

..see in old photos where you are deriving from.

Explore the evolution of your hometown: Imagine your hometown decades ago or how has the vacation spot you often visited with your parents has changed. The streets, buildings, and people — how have they transformed? Old photos can reveal hidden narratives, like the corner store that’s now a trendy café or the bustling square that’s now a quiet park.

Maybe you still have such old photos of your parents or grandparents in your drawer that should actually be made available to the interested audience?!

What is this Vintage Photo Platform about?

Photo archiving, management and presentation platform for historical color imagery and vintage photos, ..it started with a chance find of kodachrome and agfachrome slides in the attic...

The idea for this platform didn't come up straight away. It began with the digitization of large collections of family film and slides. The urgent desire for better photo quality than what standard scanners and photo editing software could provide led to the creation of custom algorithms for enhancing and restoring images. These self-developed algorithms utilizing artificial intelligence models resulted in much better digital copies of analog Film and transparent slides than expected. Those old Photos and Slides that were not noticeable in the original before they have been processed with AI components were suddenly very interesting to look at and the detail rich scans enticed to "Pixel-Peeping".

Designed as Collaborative Repository

Designated for enthusiasts and afficionados of old photos.

More and more it became clear, that the best solution would be a platform, that is designed to serve as a communal repository for historical images sourced from private collections. Thus a performant Digital Asset Management Software, that potentially can handle hundred of thousands images online was sought after. Finally we found what we were looking for in an Open Source Online Photo Management and Presentation Solution, that we individually customized and developed further.

Why to Present Vintage Pics Here?

This website is free and non-commercial. For registered users there are no ads or paywalls as this is a non-profit project designed to assist content creators, historians, and history enthusiasts worldwide.

This project relies on contributions and collaborative efforts of its users. Therefore, we urge all vintage photo enthusiasts to explore their own photo collections and share them on this platform.

You are welcome to register and join our photo community or to affiliate with us!

Our aim is to build the most extensive non-commercial vintage photo archive possible.

Maybe you still have old photos of your parents or grandparents in your drawer that should actually be made available to the interested audience?!

Free Membership

This Photo Archiving, Management, and Presentation Platform is designed as non-commercial Online-Repository and Archive for Historic Color Images sourced from private photo and film collections. It is tailored for individuals passionate about vintage photos, offering access to restored and AI-enhanced images contributed by its members.

Visualized History

Presenting old photographs will offer insights into the everyday lives, fashion, architecture, and cultural subtleties of past eras. By showcasing historical events, locations, and individuals, this Archive serves as a visual repository for photo enthusiasts with a genuine interest in history. Or just indulge in old memories by watching old photographs!

Heritage Preservation

Vintage photos play a significant role in Preservation of Heritage and helping us understand cultural traditions and societal evolution: In conjunction with your photo contributions and by showcasing your own pics the conservation and appreciation of historical heritage will be strengthened, all together fostering a sense of cultural stewardship.

Showcase your old Family Pics

Alongside enjoying the curated content, registered users are allowed to showcase their own family's private photo collection. Anyone is welcome to upload their digitized vintage color analog photos on this platform and present them to an audience of history buffs!

Educational Resource

History enthusiasts can use this vintage photo webpage as educational resources, enhancing their knowledge of specific time periods, events, and geographical locations and gaining a more profound understanding of historical contexts of past eras.

Cultural Exchange

Last but not least, we hope that the international, multi-lingual, collobarative nature of this platform and its worldwide coverage of photo captures might also strengthens the idea of cultural exchange and international understanding.

Time-critical Factors in the Lifespan of Films and Slides

Digitize your Films and Slides now!

Analog film and slides have a limited lifespan! If you still have analog color films or slides undigitized in storage, it is crucial to digitize them as soon as possible. Analog color films have a limited lifespan due to the chemical layers of color emulsions they contain. After decades, these films deteriorate, making it essential to transition them into the digital realm. This platform has accumulated a wealth of specialist knowledge in the digitization of analogue film material. Get into touch with community members and learn what is the Best Praxis Approach do digitize your film material! We intend to offer additional information and practical guidance on the best techniques for digitizing and restoring old color slides and films. On request we can give optimal parametrization for scanning.

Showcase Photos with Text Infos + EXIF and IPTC data

Iti is free!

Registered users are allowed to upload and label digitized old color photos. Individual editing of text information associated with the image is possible by allowing registered users to edit the "title," "author," and "image description" fields. GPS data is automatically extracted from EXIF- and IPTC data, while uploading your photos to the platform. EXIF and IPTC Metadata that has been already created and stored in the picture files by your photo management software, like e.g. Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, ACDSee, DXO Photolab, On1 Photo Raw etc. will be automatically imported and shown in the information tabs on each individual photo side. During upload, georeferencing of images is automatically passed through, provided it has been done previously by your photo management software.

Colloborative & Non-Commercial Platform

Become part of it!

We would like to emphasize on the collaborative and non-commercial character of this platform: This is a non-profit project designed to assist content creators, historians, and history enthusiasts worldwide. It fully relies on the contributions and collaborative efforts of its users. Therefore, we urge all vintage photo enthusiasts to explore their collections and share them on this platform. Our aim is to build the most extensive vintage photo archive possible, and it's completely free. For registered users there are no ads or paywalls on this platform. You can quit membership at any given time on OLD-PICS.COM platform and you will be able to delete your photos at any time as well. Feel encouraged to write your suggestions and comments in the community section.

Learn on this Platform How to Scan and Digitize your Color Negativ-Films and Slides

Create crispy-sharp high resolution vintage pics in brilliant colors, discover the hidden details in old pics.

See in the Sample Gallery, what you still can retrieve from your old film and vintage pics.

Learn in the following section "Digitizing Film" how you can digitize your old analog imagery in the highest quality.

The described methods of Digitization and various techniques and digital restoration methods will help you to enhance the quality of aged analog films. Usually analog film has been deteriorated due to physical damage, fading, color shifts etc.

We will explain, that conservation and preservation of physical film is not productive, and we will demonstrate, how digitization offers the opportunity to mitigate these issues and revitalize the visual content therefore strengthening their visual narratives and ensuring that the legacy of these historical photographic materials endures in the digital domain.

Read Advisory Info for Better Scans

..and ai enhanced digital copies.

We will touch several ways of standard digital photo editing techniques to enhance the quality of aged analog films and show them in examples.

Beyond standard photo editing methods we will present the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence AI in supporting digital image restoration and enhancement.

Slide Before / After Image from left to right.

Read more about various methods of digitizing and image enhancements with Artificial Intelligence AI in the next section. See image galleries with comparisons between Before and After enhancements.

Before / After

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Imaging The Past With Time-Travel Rephotography

Have you ever noticed that people in old photographs looks a bit weird? Deep wrinkles, sunken cheeks, and exaggerated blemishes are commonplace in photos taken up to the early 20th century. Surely not everybody looked like this, right? Maybe it was an odd makeup trend — was it just a fashionable look back then?

Not quite — it turns out that the culprit here is the film itself. The earliest glass-plate emulsions used in photography were only sensitive to the highest-frequency light, that which fell in the blue to ultraviolet range. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when combined with the fact that humans have red blood, this posed a real problem. While some of the historical figures we see in old photos may have benefited from an improved skincare regimen, the primary source of their haunting visage was that the photographic techniques available at the time were simply incapable of capturing skin properly. This lead to the sharp creases and dark lips we’re so used to seeing.

Of course, primitive film isn’t the only thing separating antique photos from the 42 megapixel behemoths that your camera can take nowadays. Film processing steps had the potential to introduce dust and other blemishes to the image, and over time the prints can fade and age in a variety of ways that depend upon the chemicals they were processed in. When rolled together, all of these factors make it difficult to paint an accurate portrait of some of history’s famous faces. Before you start to worry that you’ll never know just what Abraham Lincoln looked like, you might consider taking a stab at Time-Travel Rephotography .

Amazingly, Time-Travel Rephotography is a technique that actually lives up to how cool its name is. It uses a neural network (specifically, the StyleGAN2 framework) to take an old photo and project it into the space of high-res modern photos the network was trained on. This allows it to perform colorization, skin correction, upscaling, and various noise reduction and filtering operations in a single step which outputs remarkable results. Make sure you check out the project’s website to see some of the outputs at full-resolution.

We’ve seen AI upscaling before, but this project takes it to the next level by completely restoring antique photographs. We’re left wondering what techniques will be available 100 years from now to restore JPEGs stored way back in 2021, bringing them up to “modern” viewing standards.

Thanks to [Gus] for the tip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNOGqNCbcV8

49 thoughts on “ Imaging The Past With Time-Travel Rephotography ”

It’s not restoring as the info never was there in the first place. Now this is called enhancing!

The fun fact is AI predicts color, but from paintings and the few remaining autochrome pictures we know the color palette in clotching and buildings was way more colorfull than AI is believing us to think. Also take a look at the pictures made by Prokudin-Gorski to see that peasants always wore very bright colors. Way more than we do now with our pale blue jeans.

Lets not forget its an altering of historical evidence and could in the long run be seen as the real thing. The question is: does it matter?

I think the colour ‘prediction’ is the worst aspect of this – in each case it’s notable that the sibling has been (manually) chosen to have a skin tone that they want the image to have, implying that little comes from the original (understandably so as the red component is lacking).

In several of the images, the clothing is miscoloured too – white collars turn skin-toned.

I also agree that this is _not_ restoring. It’s more akin to asking an artist to draw a picture of the person from a photo.

Not even enhancing, but re-imagining.

And the colors were never that bright until the invention of synthetic dyes for clothing. Paints and photographic emulsions could use compounds which provided vibrant colors, but wouldn’t stick to fabric or would have been extremely toxic to use. The early color photographs were a little bit embellished on that point.

Synthetic dyes started appearing around 1858, so about in period with the rise in photography, certainly before the invention of the dry plate gelatin process.

We assume the world was dull before colour photography came along, but we are swayed by the fact most photos are B&W. Painting don’t show that and if we look at the very early colour photography pioneers such as Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, we see a world full of vibrant colours.

https://twistedsifter.com/2015/04/rare-color-photos-of-the-russian-empire-from-100-years-ago/

Wondering if the problem is being approached the wrong way. Instead of a detailed analysis of how photographs degrade.

An interesting aside to the colouring in problem is that the original art deco style was supposed to be pastel coloured buildings. Thanks to B&W photography sending images around the world this quickly changed to the all white style of buildings we now associate with art deco

Interesting, but perhaps not grass-roots DIY, hacking. On this website, I still enjoy the small-time player hacks. These pro-endevours and tech-demos create provocative posts, but two much pepper spoils the Hackaday soup.

There do seem to be more write-ups of pro level stuff these days. I like it though as it breaks things up a bit. They’re quite nicely written too.

Used to read popular mechanics, but they’ve gone far too far the other way and everything is dumbed down. Some articles either have obvious errors (I don’t look for them), and others seem to be written from peculiar sensationalist prospectives.

Or more simply, from my prospective – Hackaday kicks popular mechanics butt.

I’m a professional photographer and historical technics expert. In this process I see only Instagram beauty filer applied to high detail images.

Do the scientific thing in this situation: get one of their origin images, apply Instagram’s beauty filter, and show us how it compares to the results shown here.

I have some plate photos of my grandfather’s family from about 1895 and the detail is extraordinary – down to the weave of the cloth in their clothes and leather grain in shoes. Clearly the guy behind the shutter took great pains to get it exactly, perfectly correct. Applying the same “beauty” filters as this article does a great disservice to the painstaking craftsmanship of the original by removing detail and turning Abe into another Insta prima donna, of which we have a superabundance already.

Disturbingly, most talking-head television “news” these days is applying the same effect in real time – making the distinction between an AI commentator and a real one almost nil, beyond the AI version likely being more literate.

I recall being in high school and having shot hundreds of rolls of 35mm film in different grades and trying different things. I found a 4×5 view camera in the photography labs store room. No one had touched it many years. I was eager to play with it. One of the most vivid memories I have from the film photography days was taking that negative, we had one big old enlarger in the corner that held the negative between glass plates you had to carefully clean. Another piece no one had used in years, and I had a grain focus scope to focus the thing with. You get used to 35mm and how sharp things get before they fall past the peak and get fuzzy on the other side. This blew my socks off because I kept turning the focus knob and it just kept getting better. Amazing detail compared to 35mm.

People who tend to move, I can see them not making the sharpest images, but an old photo of something stationary, with decent optics and a big negative, the resolution would be hard to beat.

« We’re left wondering what techniques will be available 100 years from now to restore JPEGs stored way back in 2021, bringing them up to “modern” viewing standards. »

I added an entry in my Google Calendar for April 13th, 2121, telling myself (or I guess my AI-merged consciousness or *something*), to go on the Internet (if Vtubers have not replaced it) and come back here to answer this very comment with some information about what we now do with old JPEGs.

Hopefully future me has more interesting stuff to say than present me.

Arg, it’s not 2121 yet, but mentioning Vtubers already makes this comment dated as heck…

There is already e.g. https://topazlabs.com/jpeg-to-raw-ai/

In a way it is a quite simple problem for JPEG that has been compressed once, as there aren’t that many different JPEG encoders in existence, they are fully deterministic and the encoding parameters are available from the file. But for a repeatedly compressed file there will be compression errors of compression errors.

I had to look it up what that vtuber thing is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_YouTuber

Reminds me of the Blue Man Group, Gorillaz, and that pop group with those helmets on (forgot their name, can’t bother to look it up). And there are probably others from decade’s before.

So what else is supposed to be new?

Daft Punk? Or that 1980s group Devo?

I’m very surprised you hadn’t at least heard the name/concept of Vtubers mentioned *somewhere*.

It really had quite the cultural impact, on Youtube and Twitch, during the isolation/stay-home days of Covid-19 in 2020, where people watched a lot of Vtuber content.

It’s a bit like not having heard of Gangnam-Style in 2013 or the Ice Bucket Challenge in 2016…

Max headroom has got to be the canonical one, surely. Blipverts can’t be far off now…

“Max headroom” ?

Surprised you haven’t heard of it…

“primitive film isn’t the only thing separating antique photos from the 42 megapixel behemoths that your camera can take nowadays”

Primitive perhaps, but not necessarily low resolution. One of the most popular methods of the day wet plate collodion consisted of silver nitrate suspended in a liquid solution. Its resolution matches and surpasses modern sensors because basically a “pixel” is a single molecule of Silver Nitrate. Due to this modern scans often do not give justice to the amount of detail contained.

However they are tricky to make and they are not a negative so they cannot be re-produced.

The limiting factor of those old photographs was the lenses, not the size of the silver grains. Now, as ever, the larger the size of the image sensor/negative the better the quality of the results. The trade-off is in the size of the camera and weight/portability of the system. Modern smart phones have tiny image sensors, but use lots of image processing and extremely high quality fixed lenses to compensate. There is however still a market for medium format and 35mm digital cameras purely because of the extra quality of the results and the flexibility that exchangeable lenses offer. Large format is, for the most part, impractical in the digital age because of the economics of manufacturing sensors on fixed size wafers with known defect rates.

Probably the bigger limiting factor was the length of exposure required. Even today if you use a 40 MP sensor it is very sensitive to even small movement. With exposure times sometimes in minutes, the camera needed to be clamped down and in terms of subjects they had to remain still for an extended period.

Modern camera lenses are a miracle of modern material science, but a lot of that is concentrated on wide or long lenses and reducing them down to a usable size. Old lenses can be remarkable good, especially when mounted on a large camera when the size of the lens is not a problem. Also black and white is less of a problem for lens because they don’t have to worry about things like fringing

I agree on the resolution. When a 35mm slide is magnified enough, you can see details even after the grain shows clearly. If the slide is duplicated with a full frame digital camera to 1:1, the pixels will show way before you can see any grain. Another plus with film is that the exposure/density relatioship is continuous instead of the stepped nature of digital.

When it comes to wet plates, you are slightly wrong. A Daguerreotype is made on a metal plate and will produce a very weak negative image that will show up as a positive under correct lighting. It is copyable by rephotography. The wet plate is made on glass and will produce a normal negativc, transparent image that is just as easy to print as any nitrate or acetate based negative. Dry plates act the same with the difference of being coated with a gelatin based silver halide emulsion instead of mixing the halide with collodion.

To me, the big difference is that film grain looks nice, while pixels or compression artifacts are ugly.

Really a molecule, or a small crystal?

Grain in film are clumps of silver nitrate, not individual molecules. This is why different developers give you different grain – they influence the way silver nitrate forms clumps. Bigger clumps catch more light, which means that more sensitive film generally looks more grainy.

Collodion or wet plate has molecular resolution. It’s grainless. And for this problem you need a lot of light to register image.

Wet plate collodion could produce negatives. The image of Lincoln is literally from a wet plate collodion negative.

The Lincoln picture is made from a collodion wet plate negative.

Are we just not going to talk about how one side of Lincoln’s collar is now his skin?

Nice catch!

AI knows better silly hu-mon

Make them MOVE ! https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia

That’s a bit chilling, make your ancestors look like they’ve forgotten why they came into the room.

But will future generations know that I could wiggle my ears or flare my nostrils?

Colourizing old photos seems to reduce everyone to the same weird colour of ham…

Well, I think that just looks a retoched Charleton Heston, the new image (can’t call it a photo) has lost all the character of the original. Step backwards for me. Give an AI an airbrush, and end up with a Tellytubby.

And the whole right side seems out of focus and seems to be lacking huge detail in the hair and beard. Where did the fuzzy eyebrows go?

Am I the only one who wondered if Lincoln really needed a nose reduction?

And why in the above picture his collar is coloured differently on each end, one side being flesh-toned.

I’m wondering if it would make more sense to just take pictures of modern people with old camera technology and use *that* as the training data. Then you can compare modern photos and “historic” photos of the same person to predict *exactly* the impact of the technology.

The most interesting takeaway I saw here is how the original photos were almost on ultraviolet film. I had thought the black and white was more ore less an average of the visible spectrum. Looks like that was an unwarranted guess on my part. I wonder if there are any old photos that show details that wouldn’t register at all to the human eye, like how some flowers are ultraviolet colored.

+1 same here. The whole ‘sibling’ concept seems a bit silly (IMHO) – doesn’t seem you’re really enhancing an original at that point, and just ‘playing’ and creating a new image that kind of looks like the original person – but is something/someone different at that point, and seems to have 0 ‘historical’ value at that point.

These sorts of things always get attention as they trip people’s “novelty detectors” but in the end most of them end up gathering dust in the digital effects bin because almost nobody can use them well enough to have the result not look filtered or off in some way. Remember the faked HDR fad a while back and the awful mess people would make of images with it? I am glad people grew out of that delusion. If your tool marks are obvious, but not deliberate, then it tool is dictating the end result and you have mastered nothing.

Really relateble I just started my own travel blog and then covid hit and I could not travel anymore from my country. No travel planning for me at all 😦

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