How AI is Revolutionising Image Creation: A Case Study
Artificial intelligence is transforming the world of digital art and illustration. As a professional CGI illustrator & retoucher I’m constantly exploring new image making techniques and AI is an important part of my practice now
This image is part of a commission from an Irish Bio-Tech company, Precision Microbes, who needed two images to represent their new probiotic health product for calves. One was an image of happy, joyful calf, symbolising the positive benefits of their probiotic, the other a sickly calf: representing the negative impact of illness. They were to be a a pair in a similar environment.
Extensive searches in traditional image libraries found no suitable pair of images. Initial AI attempts using various text prompts were also unsuccessful. Previously I would have modelled the calf, the background and the textures in 3d, a very complex time consuming process. This time I used AI image generation.
The images below were generated using exactly the same text prompts. Left to Right: Adobe Firefly, Google Image FX, Open Ai/Canva, Midjourney.
the prompt: a happy healthy black and white friesian calf jumping, bright eyes smiling, well groomed, jumping for joy, kicking up heels, motion blur, sunlight. barn, hay on floor. side view
This is the first step to create an image from scratch. The calf needed to be jumping so I researched the kind of shape it would make. I drew this rough image based on a David Attenborough documentary programme on deer. This was then used used as a reference for AI renders.
The initial results were lovely, but not a very convincing calf. The reference shape was futher refined, particularly the legs, and different backgrounds and skin textures tested. AI is particularly good with realistic skin and fur, less so at the correct number of fingers and legs…
The iterations continued, concentrating making the calf look younger and the background more convincing
I then took one image & combined it with previous renders to change the skin to a black and white Friesian calf and used Photoshop’s Generative Fill to swap the background straw for something more realistic
Finally there was a lot of retouching to refine the details.
New images can be created so quickly, it’s challenging to determine when to stop. There were 100’s of renders involved in the production of this image
The sad calf was much easier to create.
AI image generators are in a early stage of development and they are evolving incredibly quickly. AI is having a huge impact on image making as well as society overall. In the future we will recognise a world before AI and a very different world after. The key to using AI is iteration and feedback: researching and creating reference images in AI, refining them in Photoshop, and then feed them back into the image generator. AI has deskilled illustration but it still needs a human sensibility to guide it.