Bringing Midjourney to the Studio: Enhance Your Traditional Photography with AI-Generated Backdrops!

welcome back to the channel everyone so today I thought I would touch on the buzz that is AI and how it's probably going to affect us as photographers from really this point moving forward because these AI image generators have gotten so good that some of their outputs or a lot of their outputs are hard to distinguish between photographs and then when you go into stuff like illustrations it's it's basically it's there they're really two sides of that coin one of them is super scary how this stuff can can take over a lot of what we do the other side of that coin I'm trying to be optimistic here is where we can potentially use this as a tool so for instance if you've ever dreamed up a concept of photographs and the prospect of the cost or time it would take to assemble a team and put together this this massive production or don't even have to be massive but just to travel or do different things to to bring these images together this right now is a pretty good tool at doing that so in just the 15 minutes before I started recording this I put together potential scenarios that I'll flip through real quick simply describing these scenes with words and what they call a prompt I was able to Output these images and I'll show the prompts I use to Output exactly what you'll see on the screen here I know there's some photographers that have started putting up AI images on their social feeds and they are unresponsive when people ask them questions about how they created these images and I have just really never subscribed to that line of thought of keeping everything a secret so I'm going to show you everything that I put into mid Journey 5 in this case to create these images one of them I mean is crazy to think that you could be on the uh the deck of a ship out in the middle of the ocean or another one I did was a group of gangsters so if you want to do a theme where you had someone dressed up in in that type of 1920s attire you can build out a backdrop just for that another one's a rain soak Street in Tokyo in Japan you know instead of having to fly over there and take pictures or pull something off a stock site you can generate what you need right here another one would be a super nice Coastal scene with waves crashing in a lighthouse in the background where you could take a picture of a model and and drop them in that type of scene another one which if you think about the prospects for production is a ballroom full of people dressed to the nines in midst of a dance or you can go at something simple like a path through a redwood forest which if you live where I live currently we don't have access to a redwood forest around here so so this just opens up doors to your creativity which we didn't have access to before without using someone else's photos or are just kind of grabbing what was out there or actually going out and doing it ourselves which costs money and time and everything else so like I said I'm trying to to view it on the positive end of things here and so what I did is I took uh one of my images from a recent photo shoot with the baseball team and I looked to generate a backdrop uh in mid-journey 5 which is what I've been using and seeing how I could take the image from the photo shoot composite it together with that backdrop to create some sort of a new image and use that as an end result instead of actually taking pictures of the stadium myself because sometimes we don't have access to those types of backdrops when we work for certain clients so this was a pretty convincing tool I thought and I'll take you through the whole process of how I got it done [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] let me just I guess tell you about mid-journey uh it's a app that is or an application that is used through the Discord app so what you'll have to do is go to Discord if you don't have an account just set up an account there and then you'll have to go to Mid Journey sign in there and then you'll add that to your Discord and then you'll be able to interact with mid-journey I believe from the onset they give you like 25 I believe outputs that you can do for free so you can play around and kind of see what it'll do and as I mentioned it's the images are based off of text prompts that you put in to Mid Journey via the Discord and they are continually releasing versions that get better and better as time goes on I started playing around I guess in version four we're now at version five and things of really gotten um impressive on here all right so I'm going to start recording the screen here and what you'll see is this is mid Journey set up on my Discord uh and uh you've got different rooms here where people are interacting with mid-journ you can see other people's outputs here uh and on top of that you can see their prompts that they put in to achieve the certain output so it's a funny thing you just kind of to play with it a little bit to figure out how things translate where you might structure your sentences and figure out what it's picking up uh based off of where it is in the sentence and there as I mentioned earlier there are plenty of guides on YouTube here to kind of help you along your way and that's exactly kind of what I've ended up doing so within Discord once you so I've gotten a mid-journey account and that allows me to kind of set up a private server and so that's what I've done here so I'm not in the mix with everybody else on the actual mid Journey server and so what I've done is started started my own over here and then I've invited the mid Journey bot into my server and so I interact with it here without seeing a bunch of other people's work there it just makes it a lot easier to what to do so uh when I started out I'm trying to make this background uh and you'll see uh based off the text prompts it was it was giving me different images most of these started out with kind of like an overall image of a baseball field and for my composite I needed to have something down on the field and that's kind of where I was struggling to get it to um push out something that that would work with my image and as you can kind of see here what I put in just a detailed Lively scene some of this stuff is some stuff that I've seen other prompts in within other prompts and have used them here and so these first handful of prompts that I put in are just giving me these wide Stadium shots which are not going to work for the composite I want to do and you can see I'm I'm continually changing some of uh what I'm you know putting in here trying to to get it to bring it down a little bit uh let's see here um so right here I've got uh as seen from home plate hoping that you know we would move the camera down home plate and then see the stadium there but it's still showing me uh just the big Stadium shots that you would take from the stands and then here I've actually added in like a modern mirrorless camera and you can see that it interpreted that by actually adding a camera into some of the images here so let me I'll say too with each prompt input you will get four Images here and then you interact with these four Images uh down here with these uh prompts here so this is number one you got two three and four so if you want to up size which we'll do when we get to the image that I've selected you can upsize any of the images here and then you can get variations of the images using these other buttons so uh finally I got a let's see create a detailed view looking up from home plate of a baseball stadium lights night time using a 24 millimeter lens with cinematic lighting and I started to get some things here but we're getting closer uh you can it's pretty neat abstracts here looks like I've got seats here and some of the top of the stadium there this almost looks like a spaceship coming in but still pretty cool this one right here I thought had a little bit of uh promise and I believe I upsized yes I upsized that one so this is what happens when you hit the u4 and you'll get a Solo image and that's what I got here still although I'm a little bit positioned on the along the wall or in the stands the base of the stands but you know I really like this The Stadium View uh and that's just part of being creative with this program and the fun of it so then what I did is I did uh the variations of that that image and I haven't had much luck with these uh that you if you look here you can see there are certain changes but I'm still based in the same spot which is not going to help me out uh so I just kind of jumped from the stadium to something else just kind of see uh and this is basically like the path I showed at the beginning of the video just learning as I'm going along and so then I I came back and I uh instead of a photo from home plate I started saying a photo of home plate and you can see it was starting to do what I wanted to do so we're on the field level at least but there's still a lot of like dirts and I'm still getting half main stadium just your big Stadium views and then I've got a side angle of Home Plate knowing that my player is photographed from the side and so I'm trying to position the camera even more for these backgrounds and I've got some stuff here that could probably work if I zoomed in uh you know just really kind of neat stuff you can you can see it's doing some weird things with some of the dirt and the foreground but I'm really liking the stadium uh backdrops we got some fans in this one but we don't seem to have fans in these other two uh and so what I ended up doing is putting a player in the image and that was basically how I was able to get where I needed to go and so once I put a player uh right here I've got a a baseball player waiting for a pitch at home plate full body side angle and a stadium full of fans at night and gave it a um 24 millimeter lens so I'll get that wide kind of aspect and then also can control in the aspect ratio of the actual image with this number here going 16x9 because I knew I needed a wide angle so if you want to do like a portrait more of a portrait sample you would flip that around and go like a four by five or if you're doing like a story or something on Instagram it'd be like 9 9x16 so you can set those parameters in here and it'll apply those to the output so you know pretty cool stuff but so I played around with this with different prompts uh using a player outputting a player and this is another thing that kind of occurred to me while I was doing this is and this would could potentially be a a really cool tool to Output mood boards for upcoming photo shoots uh just looking at some of these images it'd be really uh I would like to kind of recreate some of these actually using some of my images just because of the angles are so cool in relation to the background so it's something that maybe you can play around in here print some out take with you and then try to recreate some of that on your photo sets and then you could come back and drop them into these images and just another angle something else to think about uh and here I started getting uh more of the full body of some of these guys um it might be the actual I changed the angle let's see upward so that I think this is actually the same prompt and just re-putting it in and seeing uh what else I'm gonna I'm getting out of the um mid-journey app here but I'm getting super close on these as I'm moving along and then I got to this one right here which is what I ended up using so um I saw that I liked kind of where he is in relation to what's going on in the field the background's really cool you got some banners up here mid Journey doesn't do well with letters and stuff just yet but it's going to be out of focus so that's not going to bother me also I know my player is on the left side of the frame so I would have to flip this anyway uh and then so what I did is I upsized that image right here and that's where I ended up um within mid-journey for this image so what I did then was uh drag this over into Photoshop let's jump over there here is the base image this is the image that I'm wanting to use so this was kind of in my head as I was looking through and outputting in those images in mid-journey trying to get that backdrop that I was wanting and let me jump here to the composite image so if we look back let's go back to let's go back to Mid Journey so you can see here uh he's cut off mid-calf or so and so then and also the angle is a little bit off for my camera from my photo shoot and it's a lot easier if you don't include feet and a composite for any of us who that have composited that just brings a whole nother element in and so from the onset I knew that I was going to come in and crop so that's what I did to kind of get this rolling brought in a crop which is very similar to what the image based off of the crop that's on the image coming out of mid-journey all right so I got my image and then this is what happens when I drag the mid-journey image in and this is obviously here's a full res image out of my camera and the mid journey is a lot smaller so once again I'm going to turn to AI within Photoshop and help let it help me get this image where I need it to be so what I did is open up the neural filters really neat tools that they keep developing within Photoshop I think and photoshop's also got their own image generator coming out I believe it's called Firefly and who knows within a couple years we might just have a base image here and have Adobe create these backdrops just based off of our image and I kind of feel like that's kind of where it's going which then again takes the skill out of our hands makes things a lot easier and that's a whole nother another story but anyway let me get let me show you what I did here so I've got this uh image or this layer and there's something here called super zoom and what you would do is you you make sure you're on that layer and then super zoom is going to ex blow up that increase the image or the size of that image you can do it up to four times that's at one time there you can click this here three more times and it'll it'll do a Max super zoom and I'm not going to do it right now because it takes like 20 minutes to do and I don't want y'all to be here for an hour waiting for this to happen so that that's exactly what it did let's look at the output you can set here output and new layer new document I did new layer I canceled that and so this is what it gave me so we went from that to this and I've flipped it already but you can you know the detail and everything is still in that image for the most part and we're using these let's not forget we're using these as a backdrop so I'm not too concerned about any of this detail back here and it's already a little bit blurred based off of how I'm prompting it how I prompted it out of my journey and that's kind of what makes it so great from the start there are a couple funny things going on here I mean there's no wall here separating the fans in the field so when I get this positioned in with my composite I'm gonna have to uh probably do some bring this crop up a little bit to cover up that aspect it looks like the fans are just standing on the field it almost looks like they're on the sideline at a football game all right so we've got this image here uh where we want it and what we're going to have to do is upsize it even more and this is kind of where I've positioned let's get on that layer so you can kind of see that I've I've cropped this already you can kind of see where I've positioned where I just mentioned the fans at the at the bottom where you can't really tell that there's not a wall there and so from here what I need to do is extract my player and there are multiple ways you can do this you can do this with a healing brush and actually Photoshop and the beta has got a object removal tool a new one that probably coming out in one of the next versions does an amazing job and will probably be perfect for this but for right now what I did is I just kind of grab my lasso tool went around my player here I've been doing this obviously on a laptop really quick and then I did just went in here to uh edit and then down here to content aware fill and let it do uh the work there and that is a tool within Photoshop where it takes the surrounding areas and then applies that and erases our guy out I'm going to show you exactly what it did and so it output it to this layer right here uh you can see there's a little bit of funkiness going on with these uh levels of the stadium so I just grabbed my clone stamp tool and help those out a little bit uh the beauty of it is we're going to be putting our player in there so he's going to cover up most of this and so you're not going to really see that all right so you know this is where that player is and then this is kind of where I'm lining up for the composite so um essentially sticking him almost in the same spot and using my player that I'm coming in to cover up some of this area that that we've replaced in Photoshop but right there you can kind of tell or you can kind of see that it'd be hard for anyone to tell that there was ever a player there and so now that I've dropped him in there's still it's still not uh cut exactly where I want it you can see the color on him is a little bit off and so there's another neural filter that we will use to fix that in this type of instance and that is underneath the harmonization right here and so what you would do is select the layer that you want to harmonize with the other layer you would select which would be the background layer and so then that goes in let me show you here and bees are there so this is what the harmonize did it changed the colors of the the whites for me uh changed some of the contrast on my player kind of even that a little bit out because we've got some Haze here which kind of evens that um to a certain extent and so I think it did a really really neat job you can obviously adjust the opacity you can do it within the neural filter and you can do it here if you want to adjust that to kind of maybe bring him forward Just a Touch maybe we'll put him at 90 percent another thing I like to do gives me a little more control is is do a color fill layer and then on top of that so what I did is grab some of this color up here in the lights filled this layer here and then on top of that I can do a hue saturation which is a clip to that layer and I can just go right here onto the U slider and I'm changing everything within the scene color wise and so I believe I had it kind of in this little area here and kind of gives it a little bit of a cinematic feel another trick you can do is is add some a little bit of noise and that's what this layer is doing that kind of helps sell the fact that this is a singular image and taking it one time and so in here is the final output right here so I think it's pretty cool this is the first time that I've I've actually done this using something like mid journey to create a backdrop and then taking one of my photographs and placing it in uh I think it sells the effect and I was really found it cool enough to come on here and make a video talking about this tool like I said earlier it's a lot of scary aspects of what's going on with AI and then I will probably make another video um kind of talking about those aspects but anyway I hope that you all found this really neat interesting if you feel like it's worthy please give it that thumbs up if you want to see more content just like this in the future hit that subscribe button down there and the little notification Bell uh you can also in the meantime catch me on social media at quantsphoto on Instagram and Twitter if you got any questions comments anything like that drop those down below as well and I will see y'all soon in the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: James Quantz Jr

Views: 27,229

Keywords: photography, photoshoots, lighting, sports photography, studio photography, midjourney, ai photography, ai

Id: GZz9aQQHYcQ

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023