The Ghibli effect is a fun and beautiful way to turn a regular photo into an anime-style artwork. It makes your picture look like a scene from a Studio Ghibli movie, with soft lighting, dreamy colors, and smooth features.
But sometimes, after applying this effect, you might wish to restore your original image. This raises an interesting question: Can AI undo the Ghibli effect and restore the original photo?
The short answer is no—at least, not fully. AI cannot perfectly bring back the original image once it has been turned into a stylized version. However, it can try to make the image look more realistic again. In this post, we’ll explore why it’s hard to reverse the effect and what tools you can use to try.
We even tried reversing a Ghibli-styled image ourselves using different AI tools. While we made the image look more natural, none of the tools could fully return the original photo.
Why Can’t AI Fully Reverse the Ghibli Effect?
When a photo is turned into a Ghibli-style image, it loses many of its natural details. The skin texture is smoothed out, shadows are softened, colors are changed to be more vibrant, and facial features are often simplified. This transformation removes many tiny details that make a photo-realistic. Once those details are gone, AI cannot know exactly what they were. It can only guess.
You can think of it like painting over a photo with a brush. Once the painting is done, removing the paint and seeing what was underneath is very hard. Some details might be gone forever. The same thing happens when an AI applies the Ghibli effect. So, while AI can try to make the image realistic again, it cannot return every original detail exactly as it was.
How Can AI Make a Ghibli-Style Image Look More Realistic?
Even though AI cannot fully undo the effect, it can still help you make the image appear more natural. Several tools and methods work pretty well for this purpose.
AI Tools for Removing the Ghibli Effect
Some AI tools are trained to remove or reduce artistic styles from images. For example, Adobe Photoshop has smart tools called Neural Filters. These can adjust facial expressions and lighting and even remove some effects. Another helpful tool is Deep Image Prior, which uses deep learning to guess the original details of an image.
Stable Diffusion Inpainting is another advanced method where AI fills in missing or edited parts of an image to make it look more natural. While none of these tools can give you the exact original image, they do a good job of creating a more realistic version.
AI Face and Detail Restoration
If the Ghibli effect was used on a photo of a person, you can use AI tools that are specially made to fix faces. Tools like GFPGAN are great for repairing blurry or low-quality faces. They can bring back sharpness in the eyes, mouth, and skin. Another tool called CodeFormer can improve the details of a person’s face and make it look more like an actual photograph. These tools are especially useful if your Ghibli-style image made a face look too cartoon-like.
Manual Editing in Photoshop or Other Tools
You can edit the image by hand if you want more control over the image’s appearance. You can use Surface Blur in Photoshop to reduce the overly smooth look. Adding a slight sharpness with the Unsharp Mask tool can help bring back detail. Changing the color balance and contrast can make the image feel lifelike. If the image still looks too cartoonish, you can use AI upscales like Gigapixel AI to increase the quality and add more realistic textures.
Can We Ever Fully Restore the Original Image?
Unfortunately, no. Once the Ghibli effect is applied, the image is changed too much for AI to perfectly restore the original photo. AI tools can only guess what the original might have looked like based on patterns and training. Even the best tools available today cannot recover all the tiny details removed during the stylization process.
How to Avoid Losing the Original Photo
The best way to avoid this problem is to keep a copy of the original photo before applying any effects. Save a backup on your computer or phone. If you’re using Photoshop, work with layers to remove or adjust the effect later. This way, you’ll always have the original version safe and untouched.
AI is getting better every day and can do some amazing things. While it can’t fully undo the Ghibli effect, it can help you get a more realistic version of your stylized image. Tools like Adobe Photoshop AI, GFPGAN, and CodeFormer can improve your results. If you ever want to try bringing your Ghibli-style image back to a more natural look, try these tools.
We tested it ourselves—and while the results were interesting, no tool could bring back the exact original photo. AI is powerful, but it still has limits. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see even better tools that can do this job more accurately.
Would you like to try restoring a Ghibli-style photo? Share your thoughts or results in the comments below!
