Tuesday, May 23, 2023

For Discussion - Photography and AI

 Whether we like it or not, it looks like AI generated photographic art is here to stay.  Most of us will not look at this with affection and will want to keep doing what we like (which we should).  I won't be using it often since my composites should contain only my own images.  However, I believe we should be aware of it and understand what to expect in the future.

Adobe just released their beta version today and it really could be a game changer for many.  I played around with it and here are a few examples.  I've just touched on what it can do.

You all may want to look at their version (it is a beta version but easy to download and get started.) Here are a few examples.  Top image is the ai version, followed by the original. 

I'm going to suggest we look at this topic in more detail at a future meeting.




Meg took this picture of Manny and Silas as they were headed to the woods for a hike.  Problem was, I thought it would be more interesting to actually see them hiking in the woods.  To get the top picture, I selected the background and typed in "moody woods at twilight."  I was happy with the result.













Meg wanted one of my army images for memorial day (not sure why}, but I found this old snapshot.  The most amazing part of the generative ai in this image was that by cropping the image to the left and selecting the blank part, the program totally rebuilt my image with details that were not there in the original. I then changed the background.  It's not perfect, but considering it is still the beta version, the results are simply amazing.



As I mentioned, I didn't think I would use the Photoshop AI all that much since, by my rules, my composites can only contain my own photography.  However here is an example of where I will use it.  I often wish I had shot an image at a different perspective, ie: landscape instead of portrait, as a panorama, etc.  Now I can and the result contains only my own photography.

2 comments:

  1. Mike, AI is definitely here to stay and its effect on our world, not just photography, is going to be enormous. It is just getting started. However, my fear is that the results will not be at all pleasant, but fraught with all kinds of issues, legal battles such as copyright infringements, ownership, plagiarism, publishing rights, etc., etc. I've been following several photographers' early experiments with AI, specifically Jim Zuckerman, a nationally recognized, but local photographer. His initial work is mind blowing to say the least. When I saw his examples, it reminded me of a story he told the Nashville Rotary Club in a presentation to them a few years ago. If I remember correctly, he had one image of a tornado on a farm which included some farm animals. He used to "brag" that nothing about that photograph was created in a camera, it was all done by a computer. It was a stunning image and Jim claimed at the time it was one of his all-time best selling images. To me, that is just a precursor to what AI is going to bring to the industry. You create a list of parameters for your "photograph" and presto, in seconds, it is created with no need of a camera, just a vision in your mind's eye of what you want to create. That may be all well and good as well as "creative", but to me the pendulum will have swung much too far toward graphic artistry and away from photography. I'm willing to stay tuned to see what happens, but I doubt I drink the Kool-Aid.

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  2. It seems to me that a composite is a composite whether you do it the hard way or the easy way but I wonder what do you call an image totally generated by a command line or text?

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