Competition Can Be Empowering

Last week, I shared about my vanilla sky sunrise. Once again, I asked AI to enhance a couple of my photos. The results are not bad. I'd rather have had a genuine colorful sunrise. But it was fun to see what AI could do.

It sparked a bit of a competitive spirit in me. Lizard would be proud. I can paint sunrise into the clouds of my photos via Photoshop, and I might actually do that one day, just to prove I really can do better than AI. But for now, I thought I could manipulate another of my bland backgrounds in an otherwise outstanding portrait better than AI was able to do.

I asked AI what it could do to liven up the background. I had to replace the red-tailed hawk in the vivid ones because AI smeared the wild colors of the modern art samples into the bird's feathers. Also, I had to feed it a couple of ideas (such as the balloon festival in Albuquerque) to get images I like. Nevertheless, I liked some of the ideas AI generated. I might one day create a greeting card set with some of the images.

I decided I could do better by creating collages with my own landscape photos, and I learned a lot in the process about how to make such image sandwiches look more realistic. Just by playing with Photoshop filters. Do you know how long it's been since I did that? Since I had time to do that?!?

I LOVE my collages. I am making a greeting card set from the images I worked up in Photoshop, with no AI assistance. Funny story, though. I used one of my favorite rainbow panoramas (which means a long, skinny image that doesn't fit into greeting card proportions), and when sizing it to 5x7, I asked AI to fix the second rainbow because the top of it was chopped off in my original rainbow image.

This made me laugh so hard!

As a result, I used one of my non-panoramic images and my own Photoshop painting skills to fix the faint second rainbow. I definitely outdid AI on this one! Hands down!

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