How to restore and enhance your old photos using an AI app

Generative artificial intelligence is capable of amazing things. It can answer any question you ask, more or less accurately, or create videos and images from a handful of words . And you can also use it to fix old photographs you have at home that, due to the passage of time, light, or humidity, have become severely damaged.

There are several tools online that allow you to recover these photos and even enhance them. However, if the user doesn't have much knowledge and doesn't want to overcomplicate their life, the best thing to do is turn to an app. A few days ago, Google added the new Nano Banana model to its Gemini chatbot, which allows for easy and free image editing.

Want to change the clothes you're wearing in a photo? You can do it with this tool. Prefer to alter the background to make it look like you're somewhere else? Same here. The user's imagination is the limit here, or almost. Gemini Banana also works surprisingly well at restoring and improving old photos, even recovering severely damaged ones.

To use the feature, as we've said, you don't need to be a computer genius or break the bank. All you need is a reasonably competent mobile phone and download the Gemini app from the app store, which is available on both the App Store and the Google Play Store . Once you've done this, simply open it, tap the "Image" option, and upload the desired photo directly from your smartphone. You can also do this on a tablet or computer by visiting the Gemini website.

Once you've uploaded the photo you want to fix, all you have to do is instruct the tool to perform the editing. In the example below, you simply ask it to restore it. It only takes about five seconds to produce the result, where you can see how the wrinkles and torn corners disappear and the sharpness is noticeably improved.

The AI ​​tool is also perfectly capable of not only restoring the image but also adding color to it if requested.

Using Gemini Banana, it's also possible to fix images that are noticeably damaged, so much so that they no longer capture parts of the subject's body or face. To do this, the AI ​​uses imagination and reconstructs the photograph from what's still visible, so the final result may not be completely faithful to the original document before it was damaged.

When a photo is severely damaged, the user may need to ask the AI ​​tool to perform several edits until they achieve the desired result. This is something we experienced at ABC with the photograph below, which shows a woman holding a bouquet of flowers. The photo, as you can see, has scratches and marks caused by humidity and oxidation. It's normal for the machine to remove them all to require a little more work.

Google's new invention is also capable of sharpening images and even changing their backgrounds, with quite good results. This can be seen in this 1988 Polaroid photo, in which singer Mariah Carey can be seen in the center.

Google's tool, despite being very useful and offering good results, also has its problems. Sometimes it struggles to detect images shared by the user, and you have to spend some time getting it to start editing them. It also has problems when editing content that, although innocent, may violate company rules. In this newspaper, for example, we haven't been able to get Gemini to restore any image in which a child appears. This is obviously for security reasons.