Using AI To Reimagine Antique Photography Styles
During my time studying photography in school, I loved exploring antique photographic methods and techniques.
It’s amazing how much effort went into mixing chemicals and patiently playing with exposure time. Working in the darkroom was just as much a skilled craft as taking pictures with a camera.
Traditional photography is not solely about the image, but the process and the physical object that displays the image. It is the handling of thin sheets of metal, glass plates, and stock paper.
So in that respect, it shouldn’t be compared to digital photography.
But antique photos do have an aura, a style about them. And it is in that vintage charm that we can use digital technology to capture some of that essence.
And generative AI does that extremely well.
So this article is about using generative AI to reimagine some of those unique antique styles, not to diminish that physical sentimentality, but simply to capture some of that charm in the form of a digital representation.
I also decided to stick with portraits rather than other scenic compositions, as portraits have typically been the main use case. And for the portraits, I decided to use modern-day celebrities, simply to keep it interesting.
I used Midjourney as the generative AI tool as it seemed to do the best job in retaining the quality as well as the celebrity resemblances.
It is not enough to simply include the ‘antique name’ in the prompt as I found it is not always accurate. Instead, I would often include the description of the style to help Midjourney along.
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