Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #302 – Artificial Intelligence and Photography

Published on by Yinglan

Happy Sunday! I was genuinely surprised when John from Journeys with Johnbo has chosen to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge.

If you’ve followed me long enough, you would know I mostly take nature shots – mountains, lakes, landscapes, and flowers. There’s nothing AI about my shots as I prefer my own creative vision as opposed to the computer’s. I have, however, been playing with generative AI in lightroom after this function showed up in the recent upgrade.

It’s become one of my favorite tools in Lightroom in the last week or so because generative AI can now remove objects of distraction faster than having me clone stamp the object I don’t want in my photo. I posted this photo for last week’s WordlessWednesday and have since refined the photo even further. I took this photo at the local botanical garden on Memorial Day, by the way.

After reading Donna (Wind Kisses)’s post, I got curious on AI generative image. So I did a quick search to find the best site to create such image and surprise, surprise, Microsoft has such engine. I typed the phrase “narnia meets wonderland” from one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written – Great Land of Wonders – and voila, critters meet strange humans.

My final image has absolutely nothing to do with AI. This was created using a simple overlay – two images on top of one other and blend. I blended the images in Pixlr. When I posted this photo on Instagram, one of my former schoolmates asked if I photoshopped this. I told her it was an overlay and she stopped talking to me though I don’t know why because it isn’t as though my photo is fake, I just made it a little more imaginary and less reality. I guess some people don’t like it.

Back to AI, I don’t think using AI in photography is necessarily bad. It depends on the usage. Like John wrote in his post, photo manipulation has existed prior to the creation of Photoshop. Photoshop just made it easier and perhaps widely accessible for all kinds of people to create photos – good and bad. I feel it’s all in the eyes of the beholder to judge, not the creator.

19 thoughts on “Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #302 – Artificial Intelligence and Photography”

  1. I know personally how hard it can be to layer an image and make it look good. You got an interesting reaction from your schoolmate.

    I can see how writers now have an illustrator at their disposal. >grin< I do like the image it generated.

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    1. It is hard to do overlays on photos and I’ve only done it on a few of them. I was surprised by my classmate’s reaction too because she’s a graphic design artist and isn’t what she creates less real than a photo sometimes?

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  2. Looks like you had fun with the challenge. For me that’s exactly what photography is … fun. Although, I like to keep my nature photographs as close to reality as what I saw, I do enjoy subtle edits and enhancements. I am however tempted to take a deeper dive into A.I. to see what I can create. Just another tool to express our creativity.😊

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    1. I feel there are limitations when it comes to AI and one of those happens to be making images look realistic. I think I’ll stick with the AI removal tool for now, to help me remove some of the distracting elements which I didn’t see at the time of taking the photo.

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  4. I loved what you did with the AI-generated image. That was such a clever prompt. The photos you shared are beautiful. Like you, I often remove distracting elements in a photo (as in the case of the roses you shared.

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    1. Thank you. I have a couple of photos taken in the past, which I hadn’t been able to remove the distracting elements. Maybe I need to dig those up from the archive and work on it with the AI removal tool in Lightroom. 😀

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