👵History Brought to Life

Take an old stock painting and bring it to life. Let's explore a very fast yet powerful workflow

Yes! ANYONE can learn to do this SUPER FAST!

OVERVIEW

This article will show you the steps involved.

Please NOTE this is a technical demo so no energy was spent to push for historical accuracies.

This is solely for the sake of explaining the workflow. Greater minds and artists will certainly outshine our results. Enjoy!

Source

Finished Result

Finished Result (Alternative)

Finished Result + Zoom Out

STEP 1 - TRANSFORM SUITE: UPLOAD REFERENCE + REMOVE ARTIFACTS

Upload an image inside Transform Suite and then use inpaint to remove any artifacts. The resulting image will be used to reimagine in the subsequents steps.

We screenshot this reference image and uploaded it into TRANSFORM SUITE

using inpaint brush we masked over the trouble areas and used ARCANA SD 3 to inpaint it out

RESULT Prompt: "drawing of early new york 1800s" | Suite: Inpaint | Model: Arcana SD3 | Transformation: 50% | Style: None | Dimensions: 1483 x 970

STEP 2- SEND RESULT TO X-RAY

Take your result image and send it to the source window inside transform. This is the image we are going to transform. Select the 3 dots inside SOURCE WINDOW and send a copy of the image to X-RAY (ultrasharp):

We loaded it into X-RAY (ultrasharp)

Selected Pre-process so we could preview the x-ray to ensure we liked the lines. This also saves the preprocess asset to our library for future use.

RESULT The Pre-rendered line structure guidance image.

STEP 3- SET TRANSFORMATION STRENGTH, MODEL, AND PROMPT

Now that we are using x-ray to guide and predetermine the line structure of our upcoming generation, we can take the source image inside TRANSFORM SUITE and transform it at various transformation strengths. This will reimagine the image using a photo trained model while still adhering to the line structure of the image thanks to X-RAY. For this demo we used the MJ XL model.

Prompt: "photograph of early new york 1800s" | Suite: Transform | Model: MJ XL | Transformation: 54% | Style: Cinematic | Dimensions: 1232 x 800 | Tool Used: X-ray (Ultrasharp) | Influence: 1

RESULT Prompt: "photograph of early new york 1800s" | Suite: Transform | Model: MJ XL | Transformation: 54% | Style: Cinematic | Dimensions: 1232 x 800 | Tool Used: X-ray (Ultrasharp) | Influence: 1

Once you are happy enough with the image move to the next step. If you are unhappy with result, either adjust your prompt, transformation strength or x-ray influence number. If you notice, this image has quite a lot of blemished faces but since its strong enough it is ready to be enhanced as we will explore in the next step.

STEP 4- (optional) INPAINT TO REFINE IMAGE

If you feel that the image needs a bit of work follow the classic inpaint approach. If you want to preserve the lines as you aggressively inpaint make sure to keep x-ray active.

STEP 5- SEND TO ENHANCE

Send your transformed image result to enhance by either clicking on the ENHANCE overlay button or simply dragging the image to the ENHANCE SUITE. Note that your prompt will autamtically be sent to the describe section. Adjust the Creativity level to suit your needs. We recommend attempting at least 3 enhances within the creativity range of 1-12:

Result image sent to Enhance

RESULT Prompt: "photograph of early new york 1800s, boats, water, statue of liberty, men and women" | Suite: Enhance | Optimized for: Photo Soft | Creativity: 15 | Style: Cinematic | Sharpness: low | Dimensions: 2464 x 1600

STEP 6- (optional) USE ZOOM OUT

If you want, you can expand the image and create beyond the borders of the image. To do this to your enhanced image simply follow these steps:

Select OPEN IMAGE PREVIEW

Inside IMAGE PREVIEW select ZOOM OUT (icon to the left of reconjure)

Select EXPAND IMAGE aka ZOOM OUT (depends on which version of Arcana you're using)

Enter optional prompt and select or deselect the sides of the image you want expanded by clicking on the pink lines. Then enter the number of pixels you want added.

SOURCE IMAGE

RESULT OF ZOOM OUT

RESULT OF ZOOM OUT SECOND ATTEMPT

STEP 7- (optional) SEND TO POLISH

If you want, you can then send the image to POLISH SUITE by dragging the image to the POLISH SUITE, or by SELECTING POLISH inside the image preview modal.

Select a filter or adjust a range of levels. When happy with the adjustments then click download and you are done!

The POLISH SUITE

RESULTS

Original Reference Image

FINAL RESULT INSIDE POLISH SUITE added NOISE and LOWERED SATURATION to create a grainy old image

Alternative Result

Alternative Result