Struggling with the limits of AI in photo editing

Getting lost in the sea of free tools

I spent the better part of last Sunday trying to fix some family photos that came out way blurrier than I wanted. I kept seeing these ads for AI auto-correction tools and automated kiosks, specifically things like the ‘Selfie Booth Smart’ systems or those new AI-powered photo kiosks that everyone seems to be obsessed with lately. I thought, surely, if a kiosk in a mall can do it, my laptop should be able to handle it too. I downloaded GIMP, thinking I was going to be some kind of pro, but honestly, it just ended up being a reminder of how much I don’t know about actual color theory or masking layers. I spent two hours just trying to get a decent crop and some basic lighting adjustments that didn’t make everyone look like they were made of plastic. It’s funny how a few years ago I was worried about my phone’s camera resolution, and now I’m spending my weekends trying to salvage files that technically have enough pixels but just feel off.

The reality of high-resolution expectations

I tried playing around with some upscaling services after reading a few threads about using GPT-based workflows to generate or sharpen webtoon-style assets. The results were… inconsistent, to put it mildly. Sure, if you have a blurry face, some of these tools will ‘fix’ it by basically hallucinating new skin texture. It looks fine on a phone screen when you’re scrolling through an SNS feed, but as soon as you pull it up on a desktop monitor, it looks like a cheap filter gone wrong. I paid about $10 for a monthly subscription to one of these upscaler sites, and honestly, I’m not sure if it was worth the money. It sharpened the hair a bit, but the eyes just looked alien. There is this strange gap between what these algorithms promise and what actually looks good in a physical print or a large-format display.

Trying to replace a background and failing

My next hurdle was a simple task: removing a background. I have a few old photos where the subject is great, but the setting is just cluttered with stuff that doesn’t belong. I looked for a free background removal site, the kind that usually takes about 30 seconds to process. The first one I tried left these weird jagged edges around the hair, which is classic, I guess. I ended up spending way more time trying to clean up the edges manually than I would have if I had just taken a better photo in the first place. It made me realize that even if the AI ‘knows’ where the subject starts and stops, it doesn’t really understand the lighting spill or the depth of field properly. You end up with a cutout that looks like it was pasted into the new background by a child with a pair of scissors.

Why I gave up on making it perfect

There’s a lot of talk about how AI is going to handle all our photo editing needs, from lighting to complex suit compositing or wedding photo touch-ups. Government bodies are even talking about labeling AI-generated content, which is a whole other headache for someone just trying to make a nice background for their social profile. I think the part that frustrates me most isn’t that the technology is bad—it’s actually pretty impressive—but that it encourages this cycle of endless tinkering. You fix one thing, like the noise in the background, and then the subject looks too flat. Then you fix the subject, and the colors don’t match the new background. I find myself circling back to the original, flawed photo and wondering if it actually looked better before I started messing with it.

The lingering question of style

I’m left wondering if the pursuit of this ‘perfect’ high-definition look is even the right move. I see these branded booths in malls now—they have fancy wood and steel designs and built-in lighting rigs—and they always give that specific, over-polished look that feels very ‘2024.’ Is that what we want? Everything is starting to look the same. I still have a folder full of photos from last month that I haven’t touched because I’m just tired of staring at resolution parameters and AI sharpening settings. Maybe I’ll just print them as they are, even if they aren’t ‘perfect.’ At least they’ll look like photos, not like something a server farm hallucinated for me.