It's definitely been manipulated, I was originally thinking AI upscale, but look at the top right of the turbine, details have been painted on. Some OG photoshop going on
It's 100% AI "enhancement." Zoom in and look at their bizarro alien pig faces. I've got easily 10k hours in photoshop and have used generative AI tools enough to spot their signature screwups.
I love the photos in National Geographic because they represent the real world, even if they're color and contrast corrected. Considering how photography-focused National Geographic has been in the past, I'm actually pretty disappointed to see such a sad, hamfisted attempt at photo restoration from them. Ugh.
If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't.
It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time.
It probably worked because nobody made giant prints of the photo until now when it was scanned at high resolution.
> If it was AI enhancement, the entire image would have bizarre artifacts, which it doesn't.
a) That's absolutely not always the case with current tooling, especially professional NN-driven tooling from Adobe and the like.
b) This isn't an ai-generated image-- these tools just create detail where there isn't detail. What it has to add to reconstruct a railing, flat surface, or repeating pattern is a lot more straightforward than trying to reconcstruct a blurry face.
> It's likely that the faces were washed out by the light and the original photographer many years ago 'enhanced' it by scratching some facial features into the developed photographic plate, which was pretty common at the time.
c) Those faces aren't scratched out anything. The shapes are far too organic and unnatural looking. Those forms and misinterpretations of what's there are absolutely AI-generated. I'd bank my retirement on it. I've done this work professionally, and I've been doing photo manipulation for 30 years.
I agree it’s disappointing that a publication like National Geographic doesn’t highlight that the photo is manipulated, even if it is a non-digital retouching job.
As to how it happened, considering the image has obvious brush or pen strokes in many places, my bet is that’s all it is. The photo was overexposed and details were blown out in the highlights. Someone tried to add it back, resulting in these strange distorted faces. It did look like upscaling artifacts to me at first, but then you wouldn’t have crisp legible text in the same photo. Still, photo manipulation is photo manipulation, and the reasonable doubt in this discussion is a good example of why it should have been pointed out from the beginning.
