QUESTION · ARCHIVE

With advances in AI and photo video enhancements, have you revisited low resolution in poor quality family photos or videos to bring them back to life?

ASKED BY · Craig Macfarlane · BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:39:02

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Courtney

History Brought to Life has colorized and animated historical photos using AI. Courtney used Nano Banana to recolor, remove paint from faces, and upscale a 40-year-old faded photo of friends in seconds, producing high-resolution results her sister didn't recognize.

Craig Macfarlane

He uses AI enhancement for family birthday celebrations, searching for previously unseen or slightly out-of-focus photos to enhance. This technique makes old photos presentable as gifts.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

38:43especially if you're asking the panelists to comment on, say, a video, for example. Like if we have to click on a video for YouTube, that takes time. So that is generally what I recommend. And for panelists, you know, just reading ahead and looking at those questions early as possible also helps the flow of the show. But we'll talk about that more on another day.

39:02Let's go to the next question, Bill. Craig McFarland, Boston, Massachusetts, back on there, another panelist. With advances in AI and photo video enhancements, have you revisited low resolution in poor quality family photos or videos to bring them back to life? Oh, man, there's only so many hours in the day. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, I have. And, you know, there's this website that's been around, History Brought to Life.

39:27They started this several years ago. I think they're up to volume 12. They do things like they take these historical photographs like, you know, the laughing Einstein here. and they will take it and colorize it and bring it back to life using AI. You wonder what he was laughing about. He's clapping his hands. You know, AI has done all this with a historical photo.

39:49I've used similar tools with my own photographs. I had my sister had a photograph when she was, you know, 40 from 40 years ago, a bunch of her friends that she was at work with, and they had things painted on their faces, And it was the only picture they had of these four friends. They were celebrating some win from some team and they had numbers or something painted on their faces.

40:13And so I took that photograph. I brought it into a to nano banana. And I said, you know, first of all, the color was all faded and you could hardly tell it was a color photograph. I said, recolor, you know, bring the color back to normal. Get rid of the numbers on their faces. And it did it in a matter of three seconds.

40:32It generated a perfectly good high-resolution photo, removed the numbers from their faces, recolored their faces to be nice and healthy skin tones. And it was quite amazing. I sent one to my sister, and she couldn't believe it was the same photograph. So, yeah, I have used AI to bring these poor-quality family photos back to life. And you can increase the resolution and get rid of the grain and do a lot of things.

40:58and even like I showed, you know, bring a historical photo back to life with realistic kind of animation. All right, and let's go to Craig. Yeah, I actually ask because we have some family birthday, typically once a month, some points in the calendar, and I've got a pretty good archive of things. And so I'll, whoever's birthday it is, pull out some gem.

41:30But what I'm finding is just, I tend to these days look for the ones that people haven't seen before or they didn't pass around because it was slightly out of focus or just not a great shot and just enhancing that. And I might throw in a goofy video So as long as it really captures the facial movements and that kind of person, that clicks.

41:57Because some of them, it's like, oh, that's not that person. But just enhancing some of the ones that people haven't seen is kind of a treat. And it's things that I wouldn't have just a few years ago been able to do a whole lot with. So it's been a lot of fun. All right. Let's go to the next question. Guy Cochran in Seattle, Washington weighed in with this.

42:23What was shown in the AI water cooler? I don't know. Didn't watch it. If anyone else has any comments, they can raise their hands. But I don't know. So let's go to the next question, I guess. Francis Frey in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I use the RODECaster video for Zoom teaching. Depending on what I send in from an iPad, it can be blurry. Notability, handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry from the same app.

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from Office Hours | Saturday | September 26, 2026 | Vertical.

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