🎞️ adance09.jpg v2

Another restoration of an old photograph from the Contortion Homepage archives, but this time I tried to get as close as possible to the original image:

It's one of my most favorite vintage contortion photos that I came across back in the '90s when I was a kid. As I attempted to practice backbends myself at the time, to me this level of back-folding felt like pure magic to befold, especially paired with these carefree smiles – the kind you wouldn't expect on someone performing such an extreme pose.

There are, indeed, thousands of contortionist images in 4K, however, somehow I've always dreamed to see a better version of this particular one. Thankfully, we are getting better tools for restoration these days :3

What do you think? 😄
Me personally I like this one better
Yup, this version is much closer to the original photo - we keep getting better and better tools for this kind of work... Unfortunately it still took me hours to do just one picture... Of course, it would have taken me a minute to do a poor quality upscale and mangle all the details into some hilarious AI artifacts, completely different faces and dozens of anatomy mistakes, it would be great for the lulz and to see how much AI "sucks" etc... But I wanted to do a really good job instead and try to make it near perfect, find out what is truly possible... ;D
I wouldn't call it "restoration" but you're right that the render is beautiful. So is the original, though!
Well, I'm trying my best to assume that you didn't mean to sound as rude as you did. This is not simply a more realistic version of yuni.us/adance09-jpg - both versions are actual attempts at restoration of the original photo:

yuni.us/static/embed/adance09.jpg

Considering I've spent almost an entire day just on this picture, trying to match every single nuance to the original, and I think I got pretty damn close in everything from faces and hair to every bit of anatomy and texture, I definitely would call this a restoration and not just some puny "render".
Looks so amazing, even better than before, most of the time when i look at old black and white picture i wonder what it looks like in color but then see it in 4K makes me wonder more XD
Thank you so much! :D I'm so glad it paid off after spending a whole day on this!

I'm actually a pro at turning grayscale into color as that was exactly my coloring technique back in the old days. I would do all the shading as a grayscale layer in Photoshop, then put some colorizing layers on top - all of my old works were done this way...

But somehow I can't see this picture in color, maybe I'm too used to seeing it in black and white ^^;
Excellent, almost authentic restoration!
Thank you so much 🥰 I tried to do my best! Almost brings tears to the eye to see this photo in high quality after so many years ;D
I have always loved that sequence of photos and your efforts are amazing in bringing them to life! Please do some of the others
Personally prefer This version 💕
Variety shows with contortion in them must have been a real treat for contortion lovers living in the countryside, with not much entertainment.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯