How the Program Maker Works and Where It Can Fail

The program maker does three hard things: it restores old photos, it writes from your answers, and it checks every page before you print. Each one can go wrong in a way that matters at a funeral, so each has a check. This page says what we do, how we check it, and where the limits are.

How the photos are restored

A phone photo of a print shows the table, a tilt and often glare. Before anything else we find the print in the picture: the program looks for a four-cornered outline whose corners are close to right angles and whose edges sit on real lines in the photo. When it finds one, it straightens the print and crops away the table. A digital photo or a flat scan has no such outline, so it is left as it is.

The straightened print then goes to an image model (Google’s Gemini image models). We ask it to remove scratches, creases, dust, stains, glare and fading and to correct the color cast, and to keep every face, pose and object exactly as it is, with the same framing and no added border or color. Because the model only sees our crop, it has no room to invent things at the edges, which we saw it do when it was given the whole photo.

The check on every restore

• Structure: we shrink both pictures to 256 pixels in grayscale and measure their structural similarity. A real clean-up keeps the structure; a picture that was redrawn or reframed does not. Our tests put faithful clean-ups at about 0.9 and reframed pictures below 0.35, and the cut-off sits between them.
• Faces: a face detector counts the faces before and after. If the count changes, the restore is rejected.
• When a restore fails: we keep your original, apply only an automatic levels and color fix, and say so under the photo.

Every restored photo is labelled “Restored” in the app, with a slider to compare, and the original is one tap away. The limit: no check sees everything. A small change to a face that keeps the structure could pass. Look at each restored photo next to the original before you print.

How the obituary and eulogy are written

Your answers go to a language model (Anthropic’s Claude) as numbered lines, with the ages and durations already worked out from the dates. The instructions are strict: use only what the lines say, keep the family’s own phrases, use no number that is not given. Then three checks run.

1. Claim check. A second pass lists every statement in both texts, from names and places to habits and memories, with the line of your answers that supports it. Statements without a source are removed or rewritten, and each removal becomes a question to you, such as “Was the kitchen on Elm Street? We took it out because you did not mention it.”
2. Number guard. Code, not a model, reads every number in the texts, in digits and in words like “about nineteen”. A sentence with a number that is not in your answers or the computed ages is cut.
3. Dates in code. The age at death, the age at the wedding and the years married are computed from the dates you typed. The model never works them out.

We added these checks because an early draft of the eulogy invented two memories and got a woman’s age in her wedding photo wrong. With the checks, our test interviews came back with no unsupported statements. The limit: the check can only compare against what you typed. If an answer has a mistake, the text will repeat it. Read every word.

How the print check works

The proof you see is laid out by the same engine that makes the PDFs. For the check, we read that layout box by box:

• Safe margin: every line of text and every photo must sit at least a quarter inch from the trimmed edge (prayer cards: 0.17 inch). Many home printers cannot print closer.
• Photo resolution: for each photo we divide its pixels by its printed width. Under 200 pixels per inch we warn you; a cover photo under 150 stops the check.
• Fit: when a page has more text than fits, the type on that page shrinks a little at a time. Short text grows, so pages do not look empty. If the type would get too small, we tell you to shorten it or pick the booklet.
• Fold order: the print-ready file places pages from a fixed table for each format, so a folded sheet reads 1, 2, 3, 4. A test checks every table.
• Consistency: the name and dates come from one place and print the same on every item.

Readings and copyright

Scripture prints in full from the King James Version and the Douay-Rheims Bible, which are in the public domain in the US. Hymns and poems print in full only when they were published before 1929. Newer texts, including the readings in the current Catholic Lectionary, print as a title and reference. The Catholic order of service follows the Order of Christian Funerals.

Your photos and words

Photos are stored only to build your program and are deleted 30 days after upload. Answers are sent to the model provider once per draft and are not used for training. The privacy policy has the details. Back to the funeral program template.