QUESTION · SATURDAY Q&A

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 McFarlane · BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:39:16

THE PANEL'S ANSWER

Used tools like Nano Banana to recolor faded family photos, remove unwanted elements, and increase resolution. Historical photo colorization is available from sites like History Brought to Life.

Craig McFarlane

Uses AI enhancement to restore out-of-focus or previously discarded family photos for monthly celebrations. Tries to find ones people haven't seen before and enhance them for impact.

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.

39:16to 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. They 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

39:39colorize 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. And I'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.

40:02And 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 and so i took that photograph i brought it into a to nano banana and i said you know uh first of all the color was all faded and you could hardly tell it was a color photograph

40:23i 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 it it 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.

40:48So 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. And 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.

41:21And I've got a pretty good archive of things. And so I'll, whoever's birthday it is, pull out some gem. But 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 as long as it really captures the facial movements and that kind of person that, you know, clicks because some of them, it's like, oh, that's not that person.

42:00So, 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. What was shown in the AI water cooler?

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from Office Hours | Saturday | September 26, 2026.

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