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Artwork by @ind_Cyborg / Twitter.
An Indian artist on Twitter recently restored an old, grainy photo of revolutionary freedom fighter Chandra Shekhar Azad. The 2021 version of Azad has taken the Internet by storm.
Most of the time, people like to blame technology for making us more and more aloof in society. Some say technology makes us cut-off from our history and roots as we are constantly absorbed in consuming content or escapism attempts into imaginations. However, technology can also be positive, especially when reconnecting to our history. There is software that can successfully recreate old monuments and cities via simulations. Alternately, it can also be used to restore artifacts and photographs dying in the passage of time. The most recent restoration came from a Twitter user and the photo is of revolutionary freedom fighter, Chandra Shekhar Azad. Twitter user ALLU is a digital artist. He used technology to “restore” an old photograph of Azad which was highly pixelated and damaged. As one can assume, the opportunities to take photographs during Azad’s era were rare.
Unlike today, where anyone can whip out a smartphone and click 50 pictures in one go, olden days saw photographs as a rare privilege. Most people would get a few shots in their entire lives while many went without being photographed even once.
This Azad’s photograph restored by the digital artist is one of the very few that exist today. As you can see, the original black and white grainy photograph is very unclear. The restored version looks super impressive with highly detailed facial features. The colors are very saturated, the tiny details like eyebrow and mustache hair have been carefully enhanced, and there is a certain gleam in his eyes.
See the photograph’s before and after here:
The post has over 59K likes already and many have responded positively and many people put in their own requests to the artist.
Hero, role model, model of every college going youth in the fifties & sixties; patriotism & bravery incarnate; British Empire challenging &shaking but with a little gun; sacrificing on the alter of Ma Bharati, not with Brits’ but with his own bullet. Ours 1001 Salute 2 such Hutatma— Mohan Bansal (@MohanBa54923485) March 5, 2021
The perfection of this work is evident from the fact that Azad’s ear is a wrestler’s broken ear. Azad was a great wrestler too. — Rajesh Choudhary (@rajeshnagour) March 5, 2021
Someone used Artificial intelligence to animate the image.
The same technology was recently in the news when Keerthik Sasidharan used this AI to animate pictures of many pioneers of Indian liberation including Bhagat Singh.
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