We all use Photoshop to redesign our pictures and videos but have you ever tried to do the same on images of ancient Roman emperors?

Well, Designer Daniel Voshart created portraits using fantastic tools and bought ancient emperors status to life. He completely transformed the chipped stones and turned them into photorealistic faces that you can easily imagine walking around us.

image credit: The Verge

This quarantine project was helmed by VR specialist of the film industry – Daniel Voshart. His other projects were interrupted by the ongoing pandemic so he decided to direct his energy somewhere else. He began to explore his hobbies which is the colorization of old statues. After much contemplation, he began his work on Roman emperors. By the end of July, he had completed his work on 54 emperors and now he is all set to release those portraits and sell them on sale.

image credit: The Verge

In the first batch, he had produced around 300 posters and he was hoping to sell them all in a year or so. But his work was so commendable that he sold them all in three weeks only! He has expanded his work ever since.

Voshart said that he knew that the Roman history is popular and he had a built-in audience but he was really surprised the way he got the response and that all of that got picked up so instantly.

He used a combination of software and sources to give birth to these wonderful portraits. ArtBreeder was the critical tool which is actually an online program. The tool utilizes a machine learning method that is considered to be a generative adversarial network (GAN). You can see a variety of faces upon browsing and each one of them can be adjusted by using sliders.

He said that he works on Photoshop then load that into ArtBreeder, does a lil bit tweaking, bring those back to Photoshop and then reworks on them. This results in the most photorealistic quality.

He added:  “What I’m doing is an artistic interpretation of an artistic interpretation.”

Source: Daily Mail

Academics have especially applauded his work and said that he is giving depths and realism to these ancient statues of important people. He further said that he is in a group with many academicians to take advice and recommendations that will improve his art. He said that the selection of tone of the emperors is usually an argument. 

Seems like he very well knows how to bring history to life! What do you think?