Film stocks from a century ago weren’t just limited to only capturing details in black and white; they could only capture a limited band of the color spectrum, resulting in images of famous individuals that didn’t accurately represent how they actually looked. So a new approach to colorization using AI finally takes that into account, resulting in eerily lifelike photos that look like they were snapped with a modern camera.
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We’ve all seen old black and white photos of Abraham Lincoln that are dirty, noisy, and feature a shallow depth of field that only puts part of his portrait in focus. The low-quality images are the result of the limited capabilities of cameras and lenses at the time, but there was another problem at play that resulted in Lincoln looking more wrinkled with skin that appeared to be in desperate need of a moisturizer.