Gold-painted inscription against a darkened background, originally based on an ancient Sumerian tablet. Credits to Google Gemini for helping with "contrast painting", and the Library of Congress for providing a photo of the tablet.

As you might see from the original photo, the quality is great, but the tones & colors are rather limited. Not really anyone's fault, that's just how it looks like after a few thousand years of wear & tear. Still remarkably well preserved for its age, along with high quality details from the original photo to include subtle shadows within the inscription...

So then I thought to use AI for helping to create more contrast. Cropping in closer at first to eliminate the empty space background beyond the tablet, Gemini gave me a few variations until I specified and settled on gold against black. It's a little complicated to explain, so I just like to call it contrast painting.

From what I can see it's not perfect. I almost get the impression there should be a bounding box around the whole inscription, and that striped rectangle with smaller dot inside towards the lower right looks like it should have more of a netted pattern (i.e. more dots around to keep that lone dot company). But when comparing to the original, I would say these are very minor details. Gemini otherwise did a wonderful job of picking up on subtle shadows & outlines for optimizing contrast, I feel like I can better visualize the symbols / characters now 👍