AI Imagination | By Katie
We just celebrated Sefton turning 8. A big year ahead for sure. Every year for Sefton's birthday party, we usually send out invitations to his entire classroom, inviting them to the local sledding hill to hang out. Always politely declining gifts, we are just happy to have a fun winter option that doesn't cost a small fortune, that it seems people are generally excited to come. We host it on MLK day, as it is one of the wiaved fee days at state parks, it's a Monday in January after a long break, meaning parents are home with their kids, and they enjoy the chance to get out with something to do.
I always bring hot chocolate, and coffee in insulated growlers. Ample snacks, juice boxes, and of course some sort of sweet dessert. Lastly we bring a firepit for the grown-ups and kids alike to stand and warm themselves up between sledding runs.
It's always a great time.
To start the invitations, I thought this could be a perfect chance to experiment with adobe's new AI generative fill properties. Work finally let us have it on our machines, and I have never had a chance to work with them yet.
Insert photoshoot with Sefton.
This morning I told Sefton to get on his belly on the coffee table, Thom brought out a hair dryer. We said "smile, and pretend you are sledding"
A half dozens snaps - and I chose this:
First task was to get only Sefton separated from all of the mess of the background.
PS struggled a bit with its auto-detect. It entirely missed his black feet, which I don't blame it. I didn't spend a great deal of time, so next we had Sefton flying solo. Also noted that I missed a finger.
At last we were getting somewhere:
Next:
More foreground
Maybe a snow hat.
I wish I took a screenshot, the first attempts, the robots completely covered S's face with hat, and one option even made a hat ...made out of snow. Because "snow hat" obviously means a hat made with the white fluffy stuff.
I continued to fill in the front, maybe with some snow spraying up in his face. "Snow spray" sometimes resulted in garden hoses shooting out snow.
Sefton specifically requested tree's. So here you go bud.
Finally we were able to add some mountains in the distance, with a pretty sunset. However there was the challenge of what to do with his feet. Since AI didn't know what they were, it had a hard time generating things there. One time we did a promo of "children sledding" to which it put children shaped figures riding on Sefton's back, losing Sefton's own face in the process. Another prompt resulted in a train of people sledding on one long sled behind him.
Naturally, we decided to go with stuffy.
And we got a bear on back!
Or many?
Finally I thought we needed to remember what the occasion was for, so I threw in some balloons to touch it off. Here we have the results!
What was fun is the imagination we could have, and the countless iterations we could go with. I love the fun and silliness. Ultimately we created 12 different AI prompts into layered for this final image.
