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?