How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life

Transforming statues into photorealistic faces with AI

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life 1_N0Jv3LyLM5yFf4tK0Bh7AQ.0

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life 1_N0Jv3LyLM5yFf4tK0Bh7AQ.0

Machine learning is a fantastic tool for renovating old photos and videos. So much so that it can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you could imagine walking past on the street.
The portraits are the creation of designer Daniel Voshart, who describes the series as a quarantine project that got a bit out of hand. Primarily a VR specialist in the film industry, Voshart’s work projects got put on hold because of COVID-19, and so he started exploring a hobby of his: colorizing old statues. Looking for suitable material to transform, he began working his way through Roman emperors. He finished his initial depictions of the first 54 emperors in July, but this week, he released updated portraits and new posters for sale.
Voshart told The Verge that he’d originally made 300 posters in his first batch, hoping they’d sell in a year. Instead, they were gone in three weeks, and his work has spread far and wide since. “I knew Roman history was popular and there was a built-in audience,” says Voshart. “But it was still a bit of a surprise to see it get picked up in the way that it did.”

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life 1__7_8D7pwyK0T_mvczazJIA

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life 1__7_8D7pwyK0T_mvczazJIA

To create his portraits, Voshart uses a combination of different software and sources. The main tool is an online program named ArtBreeder, which uses a machine learning method known as a generative adversarial network (or GAN) to manipulate portraits and landscapes. If you browse the ArtBreeder site, you can see a range of faces in different styles, each of which can be adjusted using sliders like a video game character creation screen.
Voshart fed ArtBreeder images of emperors he collected from statues, coins, and paintings, and then tweaked the portraits manually based on historical descriptions, feeding them back to the GAN. “I would do work in Photoshop, load it into ArtBreeder, tweak it, bring it back into Photoshop, then rework it,” he says. “That resulted in the best photorealistic quality, and avoided falling down the path into the uncanny valley.”

More: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/21/21395115/roman-emperors-photorealistic-portraits-ai-artbreeder-dan-voshart

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life

How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life

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