The latest AI image fad reverses the popular use of ChatGPT to update old photos. Now, people are showing off how they turn current photos into oil paintings reminiscent of those produced during the Renaissance. A recent popular Reddit thread demonstrated with a photograph of a man lying in bed that ChatGPT made into a painting that looks a lot like a depiction of a martyr you might see on the wall of a lesser Borgia.
AI is far more likely to take an old headshot and ‘restore’ it by making a headshot of someone who might be the cousin of the person in the original photo. However, thanks to tips shared by others on Reddit and Instagram on how to make it work properly, I cobbled together a prompt that does a pretty good job of turning a modern photo into something that approximates the work of one of the masters.
While I experimented with prompt variations, simply asking ChatGPT to: “Recreate this photograph as a Renaissance oil painting” worked quite well. I eventually settled on a slightly reworked and shortened version of the prompt I used to successfully colorize old photos. The ideal prompt from my experiments is: “Please turn this photograph into a Renaissance painting. Do not change the arrangement, expressions, background, or attire. The new image should overlay the original exactly.”
The output is quite impressive for either prompt, as you can see from what my colleagues and I got ChatGPT to produce. As with the photograph restoration, this isn’t the same as painting these portraits, but it’s a kind of reimagining of the images in another world where oil paintings are the preferred medium. And since it’s just “Renaissance” style, it’s not nearly as problematic as swiping Studio Ghibli’s style, though you could argue (accurately) that it’s hardly the same as seeing the effort of a real oil painting created now or five hundred years ago. Still, it’s a fun game to see how ChatGPT processes current photos through the palette of an oil painter.
Man’s best friend
First up, a photo from a fellow dog-lover at TechRadar shows him giving a big hug and kiss to his French bulldog. It’s a great photo on its own. The recreation gets the important things right, showing how happy he is with his dog, even if his dog looks a little squished.
It’s not a perfect recreation since the dog’s front left paw is now under his owner’s arm, the cushion patterns are different, and, most importantly, the tattoos are far from identical. Maybe it’s a realistic depiction of what tattoos back then would look like. Still, from a distance, it’s undeniably the same photo transformed into oil. Let’s say the differences come from it being painted by an apprentice, not the master of a studio.
More puppy love
As a fan of dogs, I decided to make an image using a photograph (with her permission) of my wife with our dog. The painting captured both my wife’s outfit and how relaxed the dog is in her arms.
While I wouldn’t call the faces identical, the expressions of both the woman and dog are spot-on, and the outfit even has most of the same folds in it. The only major difference is that the outdoor rock steps seem to have been transplanted to inside a cave.
Archery AI
I decided it would be good to see how the AI performed when the photo had a little more connection to the Renaissance, or as much as a Renaissance fair ever can. I used a photograph of my wife testing her archery skills at the fair. I won’t say that it turned her into an epic warrior-in-training preparing to defend her village, but it’s a pretty impressive remake of the moment, including her pose and outfit.
Renaissance dinosaurs
Another colleague sent me his attempt with the trend, starting with a picture of him gazing in awe at a robot dinosaur with theatrical awe, bathed in suburban daylight. The AI remake transforms this scene into a Renaissance drama with a living dinosaur.
My colleague is apparently in the midst of discovering a long-extinct species of dinosaur, and it looks like he’s unsure how it happened. The light shifts from casual morning to candlelit reverence, and the dinosaur’s expression is either friendly or hungry. Impressively, the t-shirt not only maintains the words from the original image, but also the font.
Fairies and dragons
I was amazed that ChatGPT decided a toy should be a living animal, so I went ahead and used the prompt with a photo of my wife as a woodland fairy and my young son as a dragon. As you can see, ChatGPT made the same transformation. The obviously fake pointy ears and plastic wings become natural parts of my wife’s body, oh, and my costume-clad toddler is now a baby dragon. He’s turned into a fully rendered beastlet, complete with shimmering scales and just a hint of danger in its glowing eyes. The location is vague, and the lighting matches a painting of the time, but it’s undeniably a fantasy scene.
It’s not clear why the AI decided a costume or a toy should be an actual animal, or even why fake ears and wings should be treated like the real thing. But it’s just a vagary of AI. When I tried again, the result was far closer to reality, putting the child in a costume instead of deciding it’s a real dragon, so it’s worth retrying the prompt if the result leaves you unsatisfied. My wife remains a fae queen of the forest in the new image, but that’s just fine with me.
