[Leica] Commentary on new tools available in LR and PS

[Jayanand Govindaraj]

My belief is what I call the "Ansel Adams" mantra - use any tool that is
available to achieve a vision of what a photograph should be, but do not
hide their use. I use all the AI tools - actually, I find them
indispensable (they have been available on Photoshop, Topaz and Luminar for
some time now). I am especially chuffed on how old digital images from the
early years (6-8 mp images) can be given a very polished makeover with
modern PP tools, and how easy and effortless masking has become. The trick
is not to use these very powerful tools in a clumsy or wholesale manner,
but with restraint, just to subtly improve aspects of an image. Less is
definitely more in the usage, but not applying them at all still stays
becalmed at zilch!

For those who made a good living on stock photography, my observation is
that they made a good living for decades, be happy with that. After all,
the only constant is change, we adapt or perish. As an example, I owned and
ran a stockbroking company for 20 years. When we started out in 1990,
brokerage on market transactions used to be 1-2%. When we sold it in 2012,
that had dropped to 0.05-0.1%. We adapted, survived and were making 100x
the income in 2012 that we were making in 1990. No point constantly looking
in the rear view mirror, it gets us nowhere.

Cheers
Jayanand

On Mon, May 27, 2024 at 9:51 PM Don Dory via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
wrote:

> Greetings to all.  For those using Adobe products I am sure you have
> noticed a significant improvement in the creative fill or removal AI.  I
> think it is worth thinking through the art form and its believability
> currently.
>
> For those not familiar take a look at Julieanne Kosts YouTube brief video
> on the new tools.
>
> Most of us are aware of what skilled darkroom workers were capable of
> either with the creativity vis a vis images coming from Stalin's Soviet
> Union or Jerry Uselman's creations.  I am speaking specifically about
> creative fill that allows whole portions of an image to be changed into new
> pixels that can then be further manipulated.  It seems to me that this both
> allows an image to be far closer to what the photographer visualized when
> capturing the image as well as taking photography even further from
> believability.
>
> Even further afield in generative AI where you state what you want and an
> AI creates an image that can be further edited either by the AI or the
> requestor.
>
> Creatively I rather like these new tools but there are objective issues
> with them as well.
>
>
>
> --
> Don
> don.dory at gmail.com
>
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