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I tried img2img. It will do rough finishing work but it won't take some lighting vectors and match my lighting. It won't shift the viewpoint by 18 degrees. It p

I tried img2img. It will do rough finishing work but it won't take some lighting vectors and match my lighting. It won't shift the viewpoint by 18 degrees. It puts a smooth sheen on rough work with broad stroke needs and that's valuable in some cases, but it is not a general-purpose professional tool. Canva competently satisfies most non-professional needs but it only satisfies a narrow slice of professional needs. Trying to use it for most professional work takes vastly more time and effort than using a proper professional tool. LaTeX fits academic paper publisher's needs and can pump out formatted and laid-out text far quicker than someone using InDesign but you'd go crazy trying to assemble a modern magazine or high-end book. It doesn't need polish or sheen. It needs something fundamentally structurally different. I'm both a professional digital artists and a long time back-end software developer. This slice of time has really opened my eyes to what it must be like for most non-developers to speak to developers: constantly oversimplifying your use case and assuming some algorithmic approximation will do without really understanding the problem.

jstarfish 3y ago
Fair enough. Your 3D modeling needs might be a bit advanced for the current state of things. It works pretty well for flat graphic design, stock photo or illustration purposes. I'm holding out for an instruct-based model that will take explicit instructions, or at least layered prompts. Mutating the original prompt along with the picture (or changing the entire thing to only describe certain parts, a la inpainting) is frustrating to me.
- chefandy 3y ago
  That's just one specific example of why it fails as a high-level general professional tool. Even for tasks like straight-up photo finishing... might be OK for making some neat thing or adding some generated detail to a phone shot but no way that's going to finish someone's professionally shot photos. It might replace Fiverr graphic design that was probably done with a template but real graphic design has conceptual meaning. Making the actual assets is the easy part. I think what most developers don't realize is that creating media, even snazzy, captivating images, is a tiny portion of the work commercial artists and designers do beyond Fiverr or the people working at sign shops. We've got bazillions of stock photos, asset stores, etc. etc. etc. available at our fingertips at a pretty low cost... and we use them, just as we'll use AI generated images in our processes... Just not for anything that actually matters. Reducing art and design to what so many people have is nearly akin to reducing coding to how fast someone can generate code regardless of it's suitability for the purpose. I could go into Adobe Illustrator and make most of the vector art you see on the net in a few minutes. Knowing what needs to go on the screen, exactly how it needs to go on the screen, and the effects of putting it there, what it communicates and to whom, etc. etc. etc. are the hard parts. You could have a tool that would instantly translate millions of pretty images from someone's imagination in a matter of milliseconds but that's not going to make them useful for communication or anything else. So very much of this hype is people simply assuming that they understand something that they don't. And that's why the UIs for most FOSS applications suck yet the project contributors will defend them like their own children.

jstarfish 3y ago

Fair enough. Your 3D modeling needs might be a bit advanced for the current state of things. It works pretty well for flat graphic design, stock photo or illustration purposes. I'm holding out for an instruct-based model that will take explicit instructions, or at least layered prompts. Mutating the original prompt along with the picture (or changing the entire thing to only describe certain parts, a la inpainting) is frustrating to me.

chefandy 3y ago
That's just one specific example of why it fails as a high-level general professional tool. Even for tasks like straight-up photo finishing... might be OK for making some neat thing or adding some generated detail to a phone shot but no way that's going to finish someone's professionally shot photos. It might replace Fiverr graphic design that was probably done with a template but real graphic design has conceptual meaning. Making the actual assets is the easy part. I think what most developers don't realize is that creating media, even snazzy, captivating images, is a tiny portion of the work commercial artists and designers do beyond Fiverr or the people working at sign shops. We've got bazillions of stock photos, asset stores, etc. etc. etc. available at our fingertips at a pretty low cost... and we use them, just as we'll use AI generated images in our processes... Just not for anything that actually matters. Reducing art and design to what so many people have is nearly akin to reducing coding to how fast someone can generate code regardless of it's suitability for the purpose. I could go into Adobe Illustrator and make most of the vector art you see on the net in a few minutes. Knowing what needs to go on the screen, exactly how it needs to go on the screen, and the effects of putting it there, what it communicates and to whom, etc. etc. etc. are the hard parts. You could have a tool that would instantly translate millions of pretty images from someone's imagination in a matter of milliseconds but that's not going to make them useful for communication or anything else. So very much of this hype is people simply assuming that they understand something that they don't. And that's why the UIs for most FOSS applications suck yet the project contributors will defend them like their own children.