The regional train service is very good!
I might do that if I’m feeling fragile. Otherwise I’ll drive just for the adventure of it…not in one go though…B&B or a small hotel on the way!
Love these photos. I prefer the sepia @billybutcher because there is a warmth to it.
I too have stacks of photos including some of my grandmother, her sister and her two brothers - one of whom died in the first world war of wounds and is buried in the Huts cemetery - I too will get there one day. @Bonzocat
Sadly I have no idea who is who in the photos. My grandmother and her sister look very similar so I don’t know which is which - or the brothers. If it’s your own family, no one thinks to put names on the back.
That was partly pragmatic as there is a lot of damage around the edges of the original, but the crop is pleasing. It is almost exactly 3:2 ratio as well which is interesting as I just went for what “looked right”.
If it ain’t broke 
This is an old pic of my grandparents on my mother’s side, and the army uniform my grandfather is wearing includes what I believe is called a ‘soft trench cap’.
He was a Frenchman and he’s wearing a British uniform – maybe he became nationalized - I don’t know how the bureaucracy worked back then.
He surprised my one day telling me how he and a mate has been approached by a lost French woman and they were unable to help her because of language difficulties, and it wasn’t until later that his mate reminded my grandfather that he was French. He came to the UK with his mother when he was 10. A senior moment perhaps, or maybe he had forgotten his native language. Is that possible?
Sorry if I’m belabouring this, but came across a free photo restoration site, which looks not too bad. I uploaded my original, downloaded the restoration, then applied a gaussian blur, and I think it looks OK, even the fully restored version.
2 Likes
Looks quite good.
In fact the code can be downloaded if you don’t want to offer up your photos to some random website - here’s that one of @Bonzocat’s grandparents upscaled x2
3 Likes
I’ve been playing with GFP-GAN a bit more and have to say that I’m seriously impressed. Sadly I can’t post the best result as the photo isn’t mine but it trivially turned a blurred low resolution image into a sharp (even at 2 or 4x enlargement) pic without looking overprocessed. Like @Bonzocat’s images a slight Gaussian blur applied post processing can avoid some of that.
It only really works on faces rather than general AI upscaling, falling back to a more general model where it doesn’t find a face - that model is OK but not stunning, but the faces really pop.
Very odd, traumatic for the neighbours that found them, no doubt.
Where faces really pop, and the background doesn’t, I use a blur tool on the faces, leaving the background as it is - averaging out the overall image.