I saw the picture below of Honor Elizabeth Waino, 1973-2001 on Quora (it’s also on Facebook) and somehow it didn’t look consistent with that era, as well as not quite like other pictures of her?
From the more genuine-looking photos she’s clearly a beautiful woman, but this one looks idealized somehow?
Honor Elizabeth Wainio (U.S. National Park Service)
honor elizabeth wainio - Google Search
Here’s her photo from the NPS site:
There’s a feature in Photoshop to clean up old photos, it removes grain and scratches and sharpens the image. But it does that by guessing what’s underneath and what the face should look like by generating the facial features with AI. If you overdo the settings (because it makes the image look extra clean and sharp) it is completely artificially rebuilding the face with imaginary imagery.
It’s obviously heavily retouched.
If this was 1970 it’d have been done with an airbrush. Nowadays it was a computer. Of course.
There is so much AI built into modern cameras and modern photo / video editing tools that it doesn’t really make any sense to ask whether a person or an AI did this. The answer is “yes”.
Now if what you really mean is “Was this image generated from scratch by an image-creation AI?” well, that’s a very different question that’s increasingly unanswerable.
Unless you can find the exact original that this was retouched into. And even then it still might be an ab initio AI-generated image.
Either AI generated to some extent or Photoshopped within an inch of its life. AI image detectors aren’t great but I ran it through six of them got responses ranging from 30% sure it was AI to 99% sure (thanks guys). Besides the flawless nature and crispness, the eyes and hair look AI generated to me.
This doesn’t mean someone just typed in “Gimme a black & white photo of…” It could have been someone feeding a lower quality image into an AI client and asking for a cleaned up and enlarged image. It’s still the same process doing the work and you’ll wind up with AI “tells” even if the photo was nominally real.
Of course, it’s also possible that the “retouching” was done before the photo was taken: A professional hair stylist and makeup artist, a skilled photographer, just the right lighting, etc.
Of course there’s a big difference between a snapshot and a photo taken in a professional studio. Still, I’d agree that this has been…
If this 1980 pic of Nastassja Kinski and a Boa Constrictor were unveiled today, I’ll bet there would be accusations of AI.
Partial nudity. Might not be suitable for work.
Link
The first picture looks like it was taken by a professional photographer in a studio with pro lighting, makeup, and hair styling. The second picture is a snapshot.
While the first picture may have been retouched (with or without AI), a professional can do wonders in the studio and the darkroom. We’ve all seen the photos that go out with wedding announcements that make our friends and family look like models. We’ve also seen the difference between what a movie star looks like on camera and what they look like in the supermarket. These differences go way back, before the invention of Photoshop or AI retouching.
It isn’t just that she has makeup or is professionally lit, some aspects of the image just strike me as algorithmically rendered. Like this guitar-string ladder thing in her hair
There’s spots where it does something similar elsewhere in her hair. It just hits me as retouched by software in some way or another. I don’t think someone just asked for a whole image out of whole cloth, but I do think it was gone over by some sort of image processing that included “smart” recreation of blurry or obscure details.
The Avedon photo is a good example, and exactly what the first photo reminded me of. Really, folks, go back and look at some of those photos from the 30s and 40s, they had all the tricks and didn’t need AI. Of course, it took more time, and maybe was no less unreal, but it wasn’t digital.
The Avedon photo just looks like a typical B&W professional photo. Nothing about it really pings the usual AI/Algo-Retouched tells (to me, at least).
Whatever was done to that photo, it gets real goofy along her hairline. It’s both blasted and blurred.
I realized that the photo reminded me of airbrushed photos from the Golden Age of Hollywood, especially this one:
And @Lucas_Jackson I remember that Avedon photo! A friend back in the 80s had the poster on their wall.
The problem is she has no texture to her skin, it’s far too smooth. Usually a blast of the camera flash is responsible for that, but this doesn’t look like that to me it just looks like digital airbrushing and blemish removal set to 150%, which in Photoshop means a kind of patching and replacement that generative AI has taken over.
the first photo is the visual equivalent of an auto-tune vocal …
It is “perfect” (note the quotes), but lacks any caracter and humanity …
I see more-and-more of those auto-tune faces (Kardashian style) in real life, too ….
Looks like a studio portrait with “soft” lighting (large light sources), a softening filter, and then digital smoothing of the face. The hair looks like normal professional styling.
Fifteen years ago I’d photoshop faces by manually outlining the face and then subtracting the features I wanted to keep sharp: eyes, lips, eyebrows, nose tip/nostrils. Feather the selection and soften to taste.
That was for informal corporate photos, and I’d use a light hand — ideally the subject wouldn’t realize the skin was smoothed. The photo in the OP was not done with a light hand.
Tough to tell. That’s absolutely a studio photo, and the one thing that makes me think it’s legit with some post processing is the fact that you can see the flyaway hairs that would have been never shown or edited out.
That has the look of great portraiture in the mid-century era, earlier than her lifetime, but not unreasonable.
Yeah, that looks like studio portrait to me.
