Way back in August of 2020, I walked through the process of enhancing an image of Texas Jack. With modern AI and computer imaging tools, it is really remarkable just how much we can manipulate an image from almost 150 years ago to make it look like it was taken yesterday.
For this one, I took an image from the collection of Robert G. McCubbin. McCubbin's collection was second to none, and this is a great picture of Texas Jack in a white Boss of the Plains style Stetson. Of all of the images we have of Texas Jack, he might look more cowboy in this one than any other.
This is already a pretty good picture, but running it through an AI algorithm (in this case Remini) gives us just a little more clarity.
It might be hard at a glance to tell the difference between the two, but a closer look at the face is revealing.
After that, I cleaned up some of the damage that is inevitably done to a photo over the course of a century and a half, such as the dark spot to the right of Jack's face and the white mark above his mustache on the left. I then adjusted the image for contrast and tone in Photoshop.
This is probably as close as we can come to seeing what Texas Jack would have looked like if we had modern photographic equipment when he was staring alongside his friends Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. And just for fun, I ran the final product through MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia algorithm, which animates still images to show us what Texas Jack might have looked like sitting in front of us.
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