Like in development, what's hard in portraiting is not pressing the button; it's spending weeks to find the model, dress the model, groom the model, do the model make-up, find a good spot, find a good lighting, find a good angle, chose the best compromise in all the settings, and so on.
It takes a lot of time to find the right model and settings with AI.
LOL...
- a photographer needs to find the right model, it just can't 3D print it.
- the model needs the right clothes, you just can't 3D print that
- the model needs the right make up
- the model needs the right haircut.
- the photographer needs to make the model take the pose he envisioned.
- the photographer needs to chose the right spot to take a picture
- the photographer needs to take that picture at the right time of a day
- the photographer needs to chose the right lenses
- the photographer needs to get the right lighting equipment, place the lights correctly and so on and so forth.
and I'm sparing you the details of all the steps in post production...
in the meantime, a magical prompt did generate 10,000 images as your alleged hard working "prompt engineer" simply had to enter a few sentences in a text area or just copy paste another prompt with slight changes, zero photograph experience needed.
So no, being a photographer is much harder (and expensive) than using midjourney.
Cue sunshine telling me how all photographic images have post-shot interpretative processing(?).
Grayscale is not very realistic, is it? Yet we adapt our perception and agree that it captures some reality.
One can use the tools to create a representation of the scene so that observers would agree this is what they saw. And one can use the tools to create a new scene from pieces.
I like to take pictures of scenery with the moon in it. I have no problem using different contrast settings for the moon. But I wouldn't allow myself to move the moon around in the image. Why not?
When we use computers to create faces combining millions of shots, it can be argued that this is photography too. (Though I do struggle to use the term here.) The deception comes in only when we present the scene as having existed on its own.
> write a reply to the following comment, in a style of a stuck up hacker news commenter. Ridicule the idea that photography is easier than creating AI art. Point out how much effort a photographer needs to put in: (your comment)
Result:
Oh dear, it seems like we have another individual who's completely missed the point. Let me break it down for you, dear commenter. Photography isn't simply about "spending milliseconds taking photos." It requires years of practice and honing one's skills to capture the perfect shot, understanding of lighting, composition, and an eye for detail that can only be developed over time.
Meanwhile, creating AI-generated art with Midjourney or any other software is just a matter of feeding the right data and parameters to the machine. It may require some technical knowledge, but it certainly doesn't require the same level of artistic skill and intuition that photographers need to possess.
So, if you really think that copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord is the equivalent of the amount of effort and artistic vision that photographers put into their work, then I'm afraid you've got another thing coming. Perhaps it's time to put down your keyboard and pick up a camera, so you can truly appreciate the art and effort that goes into photography.
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I can't wait for the top story next week where one of us comes clean as not actually being an expert programmer and a successful entrepreneur!
It took me 3 tries to "engineer" a prompt that'd produce a sensible reply to this, so one could argue that it is indeed harder than, say, understanding sarcasm on the first try.
1. Use a python script to iterate over model,seeds and prompt (pos/neg) variations 2. Use the resulting image in img2img or ControlNet for further processing 3. Use photoshop for finalizations.
that's the _entirety_ of your analysis on the difficulty of taking photos? the duration of light hitting the sensor?