OLD BARN № 054 - revisited with realizations

It is hard to believe that it has been almost five years since I posted the most recent of my old barn photos — "OLD BARN № 095" — out of my series of 300+ photos. If I'm going to get them all posted, I suppose I should get them rolling again sometime soon.

What made me think of my Old Barn Project again was my recent discovery that AI could greatly assist in removing unsightly utility lines from photos. Please read onward to see how it evolved.

So many of my photos of old barns have something obscuring the view — utility lines, utility poles, tree limbs, roadside weeds, and so forth. Also, some of the barns I've photographed were in fields a good distance from the road and became a bit grainy when I zoomed-in for the shot. I do not have a fancy camera and telephoto lens, only my cellphone. Besides the cost, I don't want to be burdened with an extra bag when I leave the house, simply for those occasional "Oh, there's another barn!" moments. Additionally, the ambient lighting wasn't always great at the time of the shots, and some barns even had undesirable lighting on subsequent visits at different times of day. I learned from simple trial-and-error that overcast days seemed to have the best lighting, but revisiting the barns on overcast days wasn't always possible. So, I have done quite a lot of editing to make the photos presentable and interesting.

One of the tools many people use to enhance photos are filters. Professional photographers often have a set of physical filters they can attach to the camera to achieve certain effects. Others, who process their own film, can achieve special effects through the way they develop the film in the darkroom. Effects can also be applied digitally, with PaintShopPro™, PhotoShop™, Canva™, and other software.

As one simple example, there is a filter called "70s" which can make the photo look like a shot that was taken during the 1970s era, 50 years ago. It simply works by slightly changing the "color map" of the photo to mute the colors, giving the image a "vintage" look. Notice in the photo pair, below, how the 70s filter makes the photo look like it was taken long ago, with inferior camera, or the photo was stuffed in a drawer and yellowed over time.

There are several other filters which are common, such as C41 (which makes the image look like it was taken with a film camera and processed with Kodak's C-41 chromogenic processing protocol) ^[1], CP (Cross-Processing, which makes the image appear as if it were shot on one type of film but processed with a different protocol) ^[2], IF (Intensify Filter, which intensifies colors by changing saturation & contrast), and many other filtering techniques. Besides filters, one can also enhance photos via individual adjustments to brightness, contrast, saturation, color map, etc.

In my search for filtering effects to make my old barn photos look better, I stumbled across one website which had some AI-enhancements. However, I did not want to use those AI-enhancements because I wanted my photo editing to have a more "human" touch. There's a certain element of pride in creative processes, when someone can say, "I did this, all by myself!" and that's what I wanted to be able to say about my images.

They also had a section labelled "filters," so that's the only part of their website I used. I noticed some of the filters gave my photos an effect that made them look more like paintings, with "brush strokes" here and there. I thought the effect was more of a "color mapping" algorithm, similar to a topographic ("topo") map ^[3] where lines are drawn between matching elevations, only this time it was through colors that matched in the foliage. See the following example of this "painterly" output I'm talking about, with the "brush strokes" in the trees behind the barn.

I had no clue that this "brush stroke" effect was not the simple results of a color-mapping algorithm, but was actually AI interpreting the colors and intentionally creating a "painterly" output. With filters named "Thin 15" and so forth, who knew...?!?!? AI was only beginning to become popular at that time, so I had no idea. So, apparently, I was using AI without even knowing it, and I've only recently learned this. 😑

I also noticed that the output from the filters caused my barns to have a very strange and undesirable color. It was really yukky in some cases. However, instead of simply deleting the output from the filter, I took one of the filtered images, loaded it into my trusty PaintShopPro™ software, played with it, and discovered something quite amazing. I layered the filtered photo underneath the original photo and tried combining the two images with different layering effects that are common in graphic design: dodge, burn, screen, multiply, luminescence, etc. Two or three of these effects negated some of the undesirable colors, brightened the filter image, and combined with the original in a rather pleasing way to create a unique output image with my own software. I was thrilled that I had stumbled upon this, and that is the technique I used for a long time. I kept my technique a "trade secret," even when asked how I did it. 😏

But still... a number of the barns in my collection remained difficult to image properly, even with this technique. Some barns are positioned such that lighting is problematic, except on overcast days. Some barns are far from the road, and become grainy when zoomed-in to capture them. Some barns can't be photographed without tree branches or roadside weeds blocking part of the view. Sure, I could possibly do some work to track the landowner, talk to them, and get permission to walk onto their property to get closer to the barn. But that would be a lot of work in some cases, especially for barns that aren't close to a farmhouse. And it would not solve the poor lighting problem unless I educated myself in all the possible camera settings to combat poor lighting. Also, my social anxiety issues would make interactions with all the landowners undesirable. In one instance, a landowner caught me capturing a photo of his barn and quite literally ran towards my car to talk to me; he was clearly suspicious of my motives as well as being genuinely surprised that I felt his barn was worthy of a photograph. So, yeah, even if I talked to all the hundreds of landowners of barns in my collection, convincing them of my innocent motives could be a challenge. So, the quest for a perfect solution to obtaining a pleasing final photo of each barn continues.

Or does it...?!?!?

I am certainly not one of those "anti-AI" people, and see AI as a tool that can be used for good. I have used AI to generate images from scratch and have used AI to enhance and restore old family photos. But when it came to photos that I took, myself, with my own camera or cellphone, I kinda wanted them to be solely by me, with no AI involved because of that aforementioned "I did it myself" sense of accomplishment. However, a recent experiment changed my thinking a little bit. I recently wrote a post about how AI assisted me in removing utility lines and poles from a photo of a house. It saved me hours of work — quite literally!

I decided to experiment with one of my earlier old barn photos that needed some simple editing to make it look better. Below, the original shot is on the left and an AI-enhancement is on the right. Not bad at all...

So, I decided to do another experiment and throw an even bigger challenge at the AI. I started with one of my most problematic "old barn" photos: Old Barn 054. This barn is situated in a very large field, and is quite some distance from the road. There are a couple of vantage points along the road where the barn can be seen, but both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. The coolest view of the barn has tree limbs hanging in the shot as well as some weeds protruding up from the bottom of the scene, as evidenced in the below original shot with my cellphone camera.

My best edit of the barn is shown below. The contrast is better, but the sides of the barn are still too dark, and limbs continue to intrude into the scene (although I was able to remove the weeds at the bottom of the shot). And the "filter" gave a nice, artsy spin to it. But, it still wasn't something with which I was completely happy.

So now, asking an AI app to "𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚎 𝚋𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚏𝚕𝚘𝚠𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚌𝚎𝚗𝚎, 𝚎𝚗𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚙𝚑𝚘𝚝𝚘 & 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚙𝚎𝚗, 𝚒𝚖𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚜𝚝, 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚝𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚍" produced the following edit to my photo. I was absolutely astonished at the result! 😯

OMG, that is freaking beautiful! I love what AI did to enhance my photo! 💖 It's clearly still the same barn, the same fences, the same shed, and the same beautiful field as in my original shot. But prettier, and infinitely cleaner than any editing I could have done, myself. The only thing I see that is an "error" in the image are the two "bumps" on the roof of the barn that almost look like sheet metal covers for ventilation shafts; those were not in the original photo, but merely a discrepancy in the interpretation of the data in the original image where a forked tree branch existed.

With only moderate skills with software in the vein of PaintShopPro™, PhotoShop™, et al., I can only imagine what a difficult manual edit would be required to produce this same result from my original. And the AI app only took minutes to edit my photo of "OLD BARN № 054" and make it truly "🅿🅾🅿!" as it did! So, I might be using a bit of AI assistance in editing future old barn photos and certainly won't lose any sleep over it. It is my intention to remember to add "enhanced by Copilot™" as a note in such cases, for full disclosure and proper credit.

💫 PLEASE NOTE, however, that I will not succumb to using AI in my writing. In my posts, ALL writing has always been by me and will continue to be so! I do not even use AI for proofreading — I do all my proofreading the old fashioned way, by reading with my own eyes, spotting my own mistakes /improvements, and editing with my own fingers on the keyboard, no agentic assistance involved.

I also decided to create a new "Old Barn Project" banner. Not that there was anything wrong with the old one... 😂 This is the original banner, featuring a beautiful barn that I have yet to share.

An old photo of me in my younger days was uploaded to Copilot™. I asked it to render a cartoon-style image of me wearing a cowgirl hat and standing in front of a beautiful old barn. The following image is a slice of the bigger picture that was generated. I tweaked it a bit so that it was the right proportions for the banner and added the border line and wording with PaintShopPro™. I will probably reserve usage of the following banner only by me since my likeness is included in it, but anyone is welcome to use the above original banner in their posts.

^_04-May-2026