1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored

Post by xgulfie » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

Post by chis » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

lowdest wrote: post #41

chis wrote: post #37

I admire the effort but it's hard to get excited about looking at some ancient illustrations which have been partly filled in by AI. I want to see the work of an actual specific artist, and be briefly transported to the times they lived in. I have this old book of the Audobon bird illustrations and those are truly incredible. Back in the day there was a public audience for high quality, expensive art prints in books…

If you see the blog about the process linked in another comment, you see that AI was used to stitch 2-page images together that could not be flattened to be scanned together, and to remove the seam where the book binding pinched away part of the image. Comparing the before and after, they appear to be quite accurate to the originals; almost all of the "restoration" appears to be in color correction for faded ink and…

Post by a_c » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

sreekanth67 wrote: post #45

a_c wrote: post #16

Slightly off topic, anyone know of any good dinosaur illustration, ideally a large collection?

following. for my son

Post by stronglikedan » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

felineflock wrote: post #47

Wow, why haven't LLMs been trained on the content of this site instead of Reddit and other less reliable/litigious sources?

Post by hovden » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

Foobar8568 wrote: post #29

NetMageSCW wrote: post #27

I don’t need another large book to put on my bookshelf that I don’t have time to read, especially one at this price, but I want one. OTOH, I have had a couple of book/apps on the iPad that were very nice, The Elements (still available) and one with items from MOMA (unfortunately removed from the App Store). That would be a cheaper way to distribute a book like experience.

In France, we have https://citadelles-mazenod.com/ and they publish large and gorgeous books... If only I had the Space to buy them. I bought a few when they were on sales, so two digits instead of 3 was good, but some limited and even larger are often > 500€. And not having the space to buy some of these kills me.