Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the audiovisual world, with applications that allow the generation of images of surprising quality. Tools like Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion are capable of imitating artistic styles of all kinds, but they can also perform much more “mundane” tasks, such as removing watermarks .
In this post we are going to use DALL-E’s Artificial Intelligence to see how it manages to erase a watermark and redo the image behind it as faithfully as possible to the original. Let’s go there!
How to remove a watermark with DALL-E
Although most people use DALL-E to create images from scratch from text descriptions, the tool also features an image editor . This allows us to add a photograph and use it as a base for the AI to work with.
In this first image we have a photograph of a dog with a rather remarkable and striking watermark in the center. The first thing we will do is enter DALL-E , and instead of writing a text we will click on “ Upload an image ”.
Once the image is loaded we will use the editor to delete the part of the photo that has the watermark.
Now we will use the text box to tell the AI what we want it to do. All we have to do is tell you what is shown in the image we just uploaded . In this case, we will simply tell it that it is a photo of a dog (“photo of a dog”, in English) and we will click on the “ Generate ” button.
Another important detail to mention is that DALL-E only generates images in square format of 1024×1024 pixels. If we introduce an image with a landscape format, as we have done, the AI will fill all that empty space by “imagining” it in the most logical and realistic way possible. This is the result.
The Artificial Intelligence has not only filled in the blank space where the watermark used to be, but has extended the image by adding more grass and enlarging the area of bushes in the background of the image.
Every time DALL-E processes an image, it generates 4 different variants, so we can choose and keep the best result.
Does it work with people too?
Now we are going to make things a little more difficult for you. We are going to try to remove the watermark from a photograph where a person appears. We are going to follow the same process, uploading the image and clicking on the “ Edit image ” button.
We will use the eraser to remove the entire area where the watermark appears.
Next, we will write a description of the image in the text box. We can tell DALL-E that it is a photo of a young woman (“Photo of a young woman”, in English) or simply tell him that it is “a photo”, to dry. Apparently, just by telling him that, he is already able to understand what is in the image.
In this case, the watermark has disappeared and the result is impeccable, partly thanks to the fact that the watermark was not in a problematic place such as the face. But what if we give the AI an image where the watermark is in the middle of the face?
To make things a bit more interesting we have also uploaded the image in landscape format, so that DALL-E has to complete the result by adding new information.
In the final image we see that there is no trace of the watermark. In that sense, DALL-E has done an impeccable job, but the girl’s face has slightly modified features. Of course, the AI has been able to imagine part of the body, the clothing and the landscape surprisingly well.
Before we finish, we must remember that DALL-E also adds a small watermark to its images. Luckily, that is not a problem as we can easily download DALL-E images without watermark .