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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

"Today, you still find airbrush-inspired art in advertising that’s done digitally rather than with ink on paper. The digital art is a little too perfect though — the gradient blends are flawless, while an airbrush would give you the slightest inconsistencies that made it look more genuine."

I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.

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Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections. We were totally going for maximum hyperrealism and clean precision. I had the same experience of craving an airbrush, obtaining an airbrush, then within a year seeing a demo of 32-bit color graphics editing (a museum had a computer set up for the public to try it out) and feeling silly.

> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections

This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.

It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.

Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.

Some anecdata:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911383

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488958

There’s a lot of CGI that blends in invisibly in most movies made in the last 20 years. Sure we notice the bottom 20% of terrible CGI + stuff that’s blatantly unrealistic, but all the stuff you miss is just quietly worked.

Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.

> Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections

I might be talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure we've "known" for centuries that imperfection has an enormous place in art. Before computers, before photography.

I think autotune is the poster child for this.

Popsongs today sound so nice but also so forgetable.

I think this is why 80s and 90s pop is still so popular.

Ironically, T-Pain, arguably the poster child of using auto-tune, has a great singing voice[0]. Apparently he used it on purpose to stand out.

Probably explains why it works much better for him than for others: he used it as an instrument, not as a crutch to hide a lack of singing skills.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ck0vJBygo

This is probably survivorship bias or familiarity bias more than anything.

Music from the 80s/90s that is popular today has stood the test of time; there's a lot more music from these decades that we don't hear today & is not popular. We've also heard those songs a lot more times than contemporary music.

I think 80s music is still popular because it is good. Many artists of that era like Elton John, Paul McCartney and specially Stevie Wonder had a very good musical background and the advances in electronic music tech gave them tools to explode their talent to new levels.

The happy accidents in this case aren't even directly discernable either. It's not like you say "oh that little random smudge is interesting." It's just an impression you get.

Old school animation has the same quality. It's all hand drawn so not quite as exact. It looks fantastic. You wouldn't really even call it flawed, just less formulaic.

I guess that makes me think "how could we model that with computers?" I mean we could make a gradient less smooth. We could add different sorts of noise. It sounds quite complicated but in theory a computer could do this. Practically speaking it may never be worth trying to implement. Kind of a 80/20 issue. That is, you could do a ton of extra work to bump the quality a bit but people are already pretty happy with it so why bother?

Exactly both of these sentiments are what, to me, make photography and film (movies in general) so much more interesting, both visually and emotionally more textured from a couple decades ago, compared to the forced perfection of both today as practiced by so many creators.

I practice black and white photography, for example. So much of what I see of it now looks like the overdone, over-edited forced perfection of style derived from the gritty beauty of much more crudely interesting monochromes of decades past.

Similar to CGI in movies. Yeah it's better in some ways ... but feels like they are often missing character.

The old films with model special effects they have a ton of life to them, more natural camera angles.

There are some cases where CG in old movies looks better than the average CG in new movies, too, probably because the FX team responsible put a lot more work into getting to look right, despite the technological limitations of the era. No matter the medium, care and attention are felt.

True but it is also like saying that some office building came out better than other because the workers put more effort into it. There is skill to to the craft but also it’s a game of constraints and how the project is planned and budgeted is large part of how it will look in the end. I believe what has changed is that producers know that cg looking cg is just a stylistic choice among many others and doesn’t hurt the box office in some genres almost at all.

I agree. I think when something is at the cutting edge, and you're creating effects no-one has ever seen before - (the first Jurassic Park, say) - people really go the extra mile to make it look as great as possible. Fast forward to today, when CG is pretty much a commodity - and it's often a lot more about getting it done on time and within budget.

That's a complaint I have about 80s music. So perfectly synthesized, it's fake. That's why I like 70s guitar and drums over 80s. Humans make artistic mistakes; it adds character.

No, I think the happy accidents happen faster with digital tools, and it is also less costly to make accidents so you will have more of them.

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