Using AI to Edit My Photos

Explination

Okay, so I used AI to help with this blog post. From editing the photos in it to even writing sections of this post! Well at least we will see…

I was originally going to try to generate the post title using ai but… it didn’t work out too well. The website gave me back some super odd titles. This is the weirdest title that I got:

"This is a way of making a photo of a person who doesn't exist but who you want to look at." 

Leaving the AI’s strange ideas aside, how can AI edit photos.

Photo Editing

A lot of today’s photo editors use AI in some way. Photoshop Elements has an auto edit button and I think that Photoshop CC has a few other AI powered tools. I wanted AI to do more than that. The first thing that would probably come to mind would be luminar ai for photo editing. Although this is an awesome software, I don’t own it and wanted to use free resources so that you could use the tools yourself. I took a look some and the tools from Deep AI caught my eye:

Photo Colorization

This tool allows you to colorize B&W photos. It was posted onto Deep AI by Jason Antic. In an editor, this is a long tedious process but using AI, it can be done in seconds. I don’t own a camera that shoots monochrome only so I used some of my photos that I converted into monochrome. After some testing, I do not think that this changed the result. Here is a photo:

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As you can see, the results are pretty cool but certainly not perfect. Below is a comparison of the original photo that I have which is in full color.

If you look at these two photos though, the AI seriously did a good job. The original photo actually has more clouds than what the AI edit came out with. No matter the small details, it is still impressive.

Deep Dream API

This tool says that it exaggerates textures in photos. The developer says Google, and I have no way to fact-check it. When I went there profile links it did take me to some of Google’s social pages, so it might be Google… or might not be Google. I thought that it might be interesting, so I went ahead and uploaded one of my photos into the program. Below you can see what the software did… Interesting result for sure, but I am not entirely sure what I would ever use this for.

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Neural Style API

This program is supposed to merge two photos. You input a photo to use as the main photo, and then you input a photo that you want to use as the style. It is an API made by Justin Johnson. Here are my input photos:

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My hope for these photos was to make the second photo have colors that looked more like the first photo… but the output photo definitely wasn’t like that.

What happened????!! You can see that for whatever reason, I got a very odd result. Also, unlike the other APIs, the photo came out as a PNG file not JPG (kind of annoying).

Deep Mask API

This next program is supposed to recognize the boundaries of objects and highlight them. This API is from Facebook Research. Again, no clue if this is actually a Facebook software. Either way, I got an error message… Maybe you could see if this works for you. It looks like an interesting concept either way.

CNNMRF API

This one I actually kind of like. It is, in my opinion, a better version of the other style transfer API. It did work out okay. This API is made by Chuan Li. Here are my input photos.

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My goal for these two photos was to make the first photo have the warm colors that the second photo has. Surprisingly, this API did do that. Below is what the output photo was. (again in PNG format 🙁)

Even though this wasn’t quite what I was expecting… It did give me the warmer colors. In the process it made the photo look a bit like a painting.

What does AI know About Photo Editing?

For the last part of this post I wanted to have AI come up with a short paragraph about photo editing. Sadly I don’t think I can do this because of copyright issues. After a very long time of testing, trial and error; it seems that all the program is doing is pulling things from the web and combining it with whatever sentence or words you used as your input. You can visit this text generation tool if you want here.

Conclusion

I have to say, right now, editing photos using these ai programs is for sure challenging. A lot of this post was trial and error and I really only showed the good results and not the bad ones. I am sure ai edits can be better in paid softwares but I think that the only one that I would possibly use would be the b&w to color converter.

I hope that you enjoyed this post! Let me know what you think about AI photo editing in the comments! I also want to mention that my autocorrect writing plugin started converting my words to Spanish so if there are any typos, I do apologize! 😂

-Digital Wonders & Smiles