As I already mentioned earlier in the course, the main problem was with a photo of my maternal grandfather.
It was of very poor quality, and his face was also covered by a palm.
Here it is:
This is a small photo that I scanned at the highest possible quality.
And it is the only photo of my maternal grandfather. There was another one, but it burned a couple of years ago. I’m telling you this so that you understand how important it is to transfer ALL your important photos into digital form. You can upload them, for example, to Google Drive and somewhere else, save them on a flash drive, and send them to relatives (i.e., store them in many places). Then they won’t burn...
I had never seen that second photo. But everyone assumed it would always be there...
In short, it no longer exists.
And all that remains is this small photograph.
My experience will also be valuable for you, because by teaching this course to you RIGHT NOW, I am restoring my grandfather’s image using the material from this very course.
In other words, these are not empty words. I use all of this myself.
So. I have this photo and a couple of people who saw the burned photo and saw my grandfather about 40 years ago.
Not very good conditions for recreating my grandfather’s image. As is the case for many of us.
My grandfather had a sister and a brother, but there are no photos of them at all, and nothing is known about either the brother or the sister.
What did I do? I used AI-powered services that restore photographs.
But the photo was of such terrible quality that they could not even identify the face well enough to restore it.
So I simply ran the photo through a series of online image-enhancement services.
In the end, I got a photograph in which my grandfather’s right eye, which had been completely invisible, and part of his lip became distinguishable.
I did a little work in Photoshop, and this is what I got:
I should point out that, to achieve this result, I had to spend an entire day experimenting with different transformations—of the lips, then the nose—which I sent to a relative for approval.
And when he said, “Now it definitely looks like him,” I stopped at that version.
If anyone is at least somewhat familiar with Photoshop, I’ll mention that it has this tool:
With it, you can change the shape of any part of the body or face.
That is what I did.
That is how this photograph came about.
At the moment, I have commissioned an artist to draw a picture based on this reconstruction.
And now I’ll tell you the story that came before this.
At first, I decided to take the easier route.
I commissioned an artist and sent him two photos.
Specifically, the original photo of my grandfather (above) and a photo of his son, whom people say looks very much like him.
Here is his photo:
To make it easier for the artist, I even rotated him to match my grandfather’s photo:
And the artist drew this for me:
And it turned out NOT to be him. No one who knew my grandfather recognized anything remotely resembling “Oh, that’s definitely him!”
Although, in principle, it might have worked. But I knew I could achieve a better result, so I continued—which is what I have just told you about.
Now I’m waiting for the second artist’s result.
))) I imagined my own ancestors on such a tree, and it gave me goosebumps.
.
), began studying human migration—and the source turned out to be Tibet.