Lock-Down 'Pastime'
Finding things to do in lock-down is something of an ‘art-form’. A friend recently introduced me to some software called 'Pixbim ColorSurprise AI'. He showed me some remarkable results, where it had automatically coloured some of his old monochrome photos.
So I thought I’d try it out on some of my collection of 19th-century railway photos. There’s a ‘free trial’ version but, as is so often the case, it is hobbled by printing multiple watermarks all over any saved results. To show the effects it produces, I made screen copies of some of the preview images.
I’ve no idea how it works but it does turn monochrome images into quite pleasing effects, like tinted postcards. The colours seem fairly weak but I couldn’t help noticing that it seemed to favour the view that GWR wagons should sometimes be red (ish) 
I thought it added ‘atmosphere’ to the scene in Huntley & Palmers yard in Reading:
It also made a reasonable shot of a Broad Gauge scene at Dawlish, seeming to recognise the sand colours and again brown/red wagons but I had to turn up the blue to get a pleasant-looking sky:
I played with it on several other scenes but the results are rather ‘hit and miss’. I think if I wanted to do more of this, it would be better to spend some time editing with Photoshop. I read somewhere that it is supposed to work better with portraits, so I tried it on Brunel:
Again, my feeling was ‘could do better’. Still, it’s something to play with in lock-down and it can create some evocative scenes. Thank goodness, though, that I have Amy Wilcote to paint some scenes for me
In a more serious vein, I set up to do some more 3D printing after a break since before Christmas. In the meantime, I had changed my laptop and had to re-load the Cura software. When I started to print, things went horribly wrong, with poor adhesion and very poor surface finish. I thought that perhaps the filament had degraded over the break, so tried another spool but it was no better. Eventually, I tried converting the file on my old laptop and it worked perfectly well! Somewhere, I had gone wrong in setting up the parameters on the new machine, so I simply copied all my old settings files across into the ‘Application Data’. I examined both sets of data and found several differences but I’m still not sure what was the main culprit! It felt like being back on the initial learning curve again!
Mike
Edited by MikeOxon
Restore images
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