Dream Factory Sessions are here!

After attending the Texas School of Photography to learn how artificial intelligence can be used with photography, I was driving home to East Tennessee in one shot from Dallas, all the while fighting my way through a terrific thunderstorm.  No matter, it gave me time to think about the work I have done with Photoshop and other applications that can be used for photo manipulation.  How can I bring it to clients?  What will we call it?

One phrase kept coming up:  Welcome to the Dream Factory.

To be fair, any photo studio is a Dream Factory.  I think all people coming in for themselves, or their pets, or their children expect to come out with images that are unique and beautiful, something they want to display in their home.

But my Dream Factory is different.  I want to create images that are the stuff of dreams and become your realities.  And I can do that by marrying photography with technology.

How is that done?  Let's look at a couple of examples.

The picture above is a friend of mine who loves two things:  the outdoors and his sweet Labrador, Sierra.  To create this portrait for him, it took . . .

• Photographing him in my studio in the clothing you see from different angles.
• Photographing Sierra in my studio from different angles.
• Editing the photographs to adjust for lighting, color, and contrast.
• Using each set of photographs to "train" a generative AI model to recognize my friend and Sierra as characters.
• Using that same AI model, I placed my friend in the setting.  I wish I could say it took only one try, but with AI you need to start with a text prompt, add styles, and then tweak the styles and the prompt to finally get a base image.
• Taking the base image, I then "painted" in Sierra.  On one try?  Ha, ha, no - see the bullet point above.  
• Now to finish it in Photoshop.  There I enhanced the resolution of the image, made sure features were true to life, and then used several applications to apply a painterly look to it.

And I bet you thought I just typed a few words, hit a button, and voila!