So what better place to start than with Microsoft Copilot, an aviation themed name that fits with the blog theme and you probably have sight of it every time you access your computer. One of the benefits of Copilot is that it’s right infront of your face if you use bing or edge, so you can just start the interaction straight away.
I’ll explain a bit about where this is going and the odd image that I’ve chosen tho head this post. The picture above is a photograph (not a very good one) of a painting that I own, I came across a historic photograph of the actual aircraft and did think about having it printed and framed. Just it wasn’t good enough for that, as you can see from the image below – the unedited image.
What I’ve decided to do is to use Microsoft Copilot in the simplest way, just to enhance the photograph. Now you could do the same thing in any number of applications like photoshop or GIMP, but in less time than it takes to load these applications we can do all the basic processing to our poor quality image just to make it that much more presentable. Now what I should say is that an AI will manage image processing, but at the moment a skilled user using a dedicated application will probably do a better job.
It is also worth noting that most of these dedicated applications have an inbuilt AI function, these will be aimed specifically at the photographer – being dedicated it should be better I know that there is a cost involved but it may be worth spending the money.
So what we started with is the photograph above, as you can see it is the actual aircraft that I have the painting of. Just there are a number of short comings with the picture, the resolution first it is 1200 X 778 pixels – which could be printed to a reasonable size but the quality would suffer. So a modest improvement on the resolution front would be good, there is also a focus and sharpness issue so we should as the AI to improve this as well.
The final area of improvement would be the colour rendition, the colours in the image are flat and dull so we should request that correction is applied to this. With all that in mind we have to create our prompt for Microsoft Copilot, the contents and context of the prompt will make a difference so I’ve provided the exact prompt that I used – note that some of this is in the first person as if I was talking to the AI.
So to start the process, we drag and drop the original photgraph into the dialog box and enter the following prompt.
This image, I’d like to increase the resolution and the sharpness bringing the image more into focus. Additionally I’d like to enhance the colours in the image as the red, blue. yellow and other colours are generally dull and not as I remember them – I remember that the colours were more vivid.
At this point Copilot will go off and do it’s thing, in this particular case it took around a minute and delivered the following image.
Now we can see from the enhanced image that there are a number of things changed, let’s be objective here and look at what we requested. We requested an increase in resolution and the AI has increased the resolution to 1536 X 1024, which on the face of it is pretty good. It has improved the sharpness and the colour as requested, looking at the two images in context of the requests it has delivered pretty much what we requested.
As you will also be able to see, Copilot has made a number of changes off it’s own bat. So you have to make a decision about each of the changes, you also have to decide what you are going to do about each change. There are a number of changes that we have to decide what to do – either to correct them or revert them.
Firstly the sky has been completely changed, I don’t think it detracts so in this case I’m going to leave it as is. However there are a number of other less conspicuos changes that I’d like to correct. Firstly the anti-dazzle paint infront of the cockpit should be a dark olive green. There is also a red wing tip that shouldn’t be there and a yellow tail wheel door that should be bare metal. Finaly there is the aircraft code, which reads AI 3 – the A should be aligned correctly.
But overall I’m going to go with I’m mostly happy for a first pass, Copilot gives limited access with the free version so I will be following up on this in a future post.