A customer showed me a photograph of their memorable 1971 Mercury Cyclone GT they had when they were younger. The photo was black and white, very low resolution, stained. It seemed like an impossible task. I scanned the photo and gave the original back to the customer and said let me see what I can do.

The world is a different place today with Generative AI, and without it, I’m not sure I could have done anything. It did a lot, but there was still a lot to do. Fine tuning the car color. Restoring badges, Cleaning up AI artifacts, overlaying a realistic license plate. Lighting up the parking lights. Adding brand writing on the tires.

Pretty good right? But there was a painful detail that AI couldn’t fix and Photoshop could not fix. The wheel hubs were not convincing. Thankfully one of my skills is building a 3D Model. I needed two unique angles, so time to call out the big guns. Note the important detail below is the hub-cap and rim. The black tire is replaced with the tire in the original image. The valve stem is so small, in the final image, it has minimal detail. What is important here is faithfully replacing the signature hub cap.

Getting this right involves lining up the wheels in the model with the wheels in the photograph. For this to be spot on, the camera needs to be located where the original camera was, the angle of the car needed to match, the lens size needed to match etc. It requires a lot of adjustments to get it right, but eventually everything just fits together.

When something matters to the customer, it matters to me.