I came across the above picture in the British Colonial Office archives. It is of Chinese miners in the early twentieth century in Borneo at a place called “Lobang Buaya,” which means “crocodile pit.”
That does not sound like a safe place to be mining, and looking at the blurry original picture, I wondered what these guys’ faces actually looked like. Did they look scared? Or were they unafraid of the dangerous environment where they worked?
So, I used some AI tools (Topaz Photo AI and the AI tools in Photoshop) to try to recover the image, and this is what I ended up with.
The hands were too blurry for the AI to reproduce, but it could do ok with the faces. And these guys definitely don’t look scared. Instead, they look pretty damn badass!! So, AI answered that question for me.
These tools are developing fast, and I can see that this type of photo restoration is going to become very popular and will be evident in videos (actually, I’ve already seen it), as it enables people to improve the resolution of images and so that the camera can zoom in on details.
What I would like to do, however, is to generate AI images from these historical images as a way to “imagine the past.” I want to do this while still remaining faithful to the original images. That is difficult to do. Sometimes I can succeed at doing so, but often times not.
If anyone has any advice (I’m using an IPAdapter in ComfyUI), please let me know, because at the moment, I keep ending up with stylish Chinese miners like these guys:
These gentlemen were definitely not mining at the Crocodile Pit.
They might have been sipping gin & tonics at the Crocodile Club, but they definitely were not sweating and getting their hands dirty mining.
UPDATE: I spent a few hours trying to get a different technique to work and this time I ended up with an image that started to get close to the original.
Below I have the original, the AI-restored version, and an AI-imagined version. Yea, I can start to imagine the past from this one. . .
