Roni Kobrosly Ph.D.'s Website

My father has an old picture of my grandfather that he loves. Unfortunately it's blurry and artifacted. For the last five years, at the end of each year, I've taken a few hours to see if cutting edge tech tools for digital image restoration could improve it. I always figured it would be a really nice January 15 birthday present if I could "enhance it" (CSI style) and frame it for him.

All of these tools (including image models and multimodal large models) failed miserably in various ways until I tried again in December 2025. I'm not a heavy ChatGPT user (I use Anthropic for engineering work, and Gemini for everyday tasks), but in 2025 I heard that it had gotten quite good at image modification, so I gave it a whirl.

I began with a simple prompt: "Please restore and de-blur the whole image. Make every aspect crisp and clear."

In one-shot, it nailed 95% of the image. Everything but the face (which in no way looked like my grandfather's face) looked incredible.

I then fed ChatGPT two separate clear images of just my grandfather's face, and asked it consider his face in these reference images, and add it to the initial output. The result was absolute magic.

Yes there is an absolutely critical conversation to be had around ethics, the loss of truth, deepfakes, societal impacts that have been going on (and will continue going on) around these abilities. I don't want to diminish that. But it was so fulfilling to conclude this five year quest and bring my dad his restored image.