Recently, my wife stumbled upon a cherished memory on her Facebook account-an image I had tagged her in. It was a photo I had taken at Babcock State Park, capturing the old grist mill. She expressed a desire to have a physical print of it for our home. This sparked a wave of nostalgia as I set out to find the image files from that memorable day, October 13, 2010.

I almost gave myself a pat on the back once I located an already edited version of the image., For the first time in a long time, I didn’t overthink my edit when I first opened the file back in 2010 and kept my adjustments to a minimum—particularly, my image of the Grist Mill in Babcock, West Virginia.

That moment I printed the image for the first time, I was filled with excitement, which soon gave way to a torrent of mixed emotions. I noticed the picture wasn’t as sharp as it should have been; it just seemed a tad off. I realized I had selected the wrong image file. So instead of scrapping this print session and locating the correct file, I decided to turn to a program I have by Topaz Labs called Gigapixel AI. I’ve used this program to sharpen the focus on old images that appear soft, preparing them for enlargements larger than a typical 8x10-inch print.

With the new image file ready to go, I tried yet another generative AI tool at my disposal, this time using exact wording in what I wanted to achieve (I didn’t have this option with Gigapixel); I typed “enhance photo, sharpen, and show detail,” without adding or removing parts of the image, just an overall blanket enhancement of what was already in the file. This process led to two unexpected happy accidents. The orange that appeared in the original shifted to yellow in parts of the image; the other was a Pointillistic effect applied to the whole picture, this put me in mind of a well-known painting I had seen several times at the art institute in Chicago by famous French painter, Georges Seurat “Sunday afternoon in a park on La Grande Jatte” (1884-1886).

Despite the unexpected artistic effects, the final result was satisfying. Lightroom was the only tool I used to open up shadows with detail, add depth to the trees by burning in the shadows, and give the bottom of the image a bit of blur to create the illusion of a soft mist. The bottom line is that my wife was pleased with the results. Now, the only decision left is the choice of Hahnemühle paper for the final print, a pleasant dilemma to have.