Image Editing with LLMs

Yes, you read that correctly. Large language models (LLMs) can come in handy for not just text and image generation—they can be versatile image editors too. Perhaps you’ve uploaded a photo of yourself to your favorite LLM and asked it to generate a caricature of you or portrayed you as a celebrity being chased by paparazzi. These are LLM-based examples of image editing in which you start with an image, add your text-based prompt to manipulate the image, and the result will hopefully resemble what you had in mind.

I recently came up with another use case for image editing. I was trying to find a high quality image of the Eagles’ Hotel California album cover. I searched the web and found many photos and scans of the album cover, but they all had one major shortcoming—the dark areas in the bottom half of the image had little to no detail. Here are 2 such examples:

I uploaded the images to both Copilot and ChatGPT and entered the following prompt: “These are 2 photos of the cover of the Eagles "Hotel California" album with different exposures and levels of detail in the shadows. Merge them into 1 photo and recover details from the shadows. Significantly boost the shadows so that it is possible to see the trees and bushes. Preserve the fluorescent "Hotel California" words that are superimposed on what looks like a car's side view mirror. Also boost the fluorescent "Hotel California" words so they are more bold. Preserve the original aspect ratio. Reduce overall contrast by making the sky a warmer golden glow and increase overall brightness, especially in the darker shadows.” I got very similar results with both Copilot and ChatGPT, and here is the result from the latter:

As you can see, ChatGPT did a remarkable job of creating the bushes in the lower half of the album cover. I honestly don’t know if it was able to recover detail from the source images or if it generated the bushes from scratch (or perhaps a combination of both). In any case, I was very happy with the recovery of what was otherwise lost detail. It also slightly sharpened the palm trees and did a very nice job of highlighting the “Hotel California” stylized wording while preserving its original look and feel. This was exactly the kind of image quality I had hoped to find in a Hotel California album cover, and although I was unsuccessful with my search, I was thrilled to learn that LLMs could generate the next best thing.

If you’re wondering why I wanted such an image, it’s because I wanted to 3D print the Hotel California album cover, and I wanted to include some detail in the bottom half rather than have it appear pure black. Here is the resultant 3D print:

If you have a 3D printer, you can access the 3D model and print profiles here. I hope this give you ideas for how you can use LLMs to edit photos.