How I Use Artificial Intelligence

I use AI tools in my restoration and colourisation work. I would rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder.

Restoration has always used the best tools available. Retouchers worked with brushes and dyes, then with airbrushes, then with Photoshop. AI is the current generation of the same thing. It is very good at some tasks and untrustworthy at others, and the value of a professional restoration lies in knowing which is which.

Where I use it

• Noise, grain, and scanning artefacts. Cleaning up the mess without turning skin to plastic.
• Sharpening and enlargement. Recovering apparent detail from small or soft originals, and making a 1950s contact print large enough to sit in an album.
• Damage repair. Filling scratches, tears, creases, water damage, and missing corners, particularly across backgrounds, clothing, and other areas where the surrounding image tells me what belongs there.
• Colourisation. Generating a first pass of colour on a black-and-white photograph, which I then correct by hand.
• Selections and masking. Separating a subject from a background, which used to take an hour and now takes a minute.

Where I am careful

Faces

AI face restoration is the tool most likely to lie to you. It reconstructs a face by drawing on what faces generally look like, which means it can quietly change a jawline, soften a distinctive nose, or give someone an expression they never wore. On a photograph of a stranger this does not matter. On a photograph of your grandmother it matters enormously.

So I work on faces conservatively, by hand where I can, and I check the result against any other photograph of the same person you can give me. If you have three pictures of your father and only one is damaged, send me all three.

Missing information

Where detail no longer exists in the original, it cannot be recovered — only invented. Sometimes that is fine: nobody minds if the pattern on a distant carpet is a plausible guess. Sometimes it is not: a missing hand, an obscured face, the badge on a uniform. When the choice matters I will show you the options and let you decide, rather than deciding for you.

Things that change the record

I will not add people, remove people, change what anyone is wearing, alter an expression, or otherwise change what the photograph shows, unless you specifically ask me to and understand that I have done it. A family photograph is a document as well as a picture.

What I never do

• Generate a photograph that never existed and present it as a restoration
• Use AI to invent a likeness of someone for whom no usable photograph exists
• Make substantive changes to a face or a scene without telling you

Human oversight

Every image is reviewed, corrected, and finished by hand. Nothing leaves here because a tool declared it finished. If a result looks wrong to me, I go back and do it the slow way.

Your photographs and AI tools

Some of the tools I use process images on my own computers. Others send images to a service provider. I only use tools whose terms prevent your images being used to train their models, and I do not upload client material to free or consumer AI services.

If you would prefer I did not use AI tools on your photographs at all, tell me. I can work entirely by hand. It takes longer and costs more, and for some kinds of damage the result will be less good — but it is your photograph, and it is a reasonable thing to ask for.

My Privacy Policy explains more about how your images are handled and who they are shared with.

Ask me

If you want to know what was done to a particular photograph, ask. I am happy to explain which parts of a restoration are recovered, which are reconstructed, and which are my best judgement. Some clients want to know; others would rather just have the picture back. Both are fine.