UPDATED: Using Midjourney to Enhance Your Traditional Photography with AI-Generated Backdrops!

welcome back to the channel everyone so I made a video about six months ago doesn't seem like that long ago but in the world of I guess technology and AI in particular a lot has changed in th those six months since I made that video so back then I was just talking about making uh these backdrops using text prompts in a AI program like mid Journey there are a couple more out there now I'm going to focus on Mid Journey still today and then using Photoshop and combining Studio the studio photography with those backdrops that are created from nothing basically and then creating a whole new piece uh of I guess it would probably be like photographic art I guess uh if you want to get technical about it but a lot has changed on the AI front and the Photoshop front since I did that video and I thought we would revisit today and take a look at what's changed and what we can do now and basically how much easier it is so if that sounds interesting to you stay tuned cuz we're going to get get right into [Music] it all right so for the first part of this I thought we would jump into the mid Journey section and then the Photoshop so mid journey is where you can create these backdrops just by using text prompts I'm not going to do a you know deep dive on uh mid journey in this video there's plenty of that information out there and then I've made some previous videos as well about a mid Journey where I might cover a little bit more but then today I thought I would focus on a couple of I guess tips and tricks that maybe give you a head start in this software uh where you can kind of figure out how these text prompts work with uh the specific images that you can pull up or try to pull up uh so let's just jump right into it right now I'm going to hit record and then right here you'll see is is basically the mid Journey website let me State too that uh mid journey is not free uh it is a subscription just like uh Adobe Photoshop is and I guess you'll have to see if it's something that you feel like you're going to use a good bit to justify whatever subscription rate that you want to go for on u a service like mid Journey here but once you go on to the website uh you can see this explore Tab and this is where you can check out other images that people have have created uh in this software and it gives you their prompts right here uh on these images so if you see something that you find interesting you can go down here and see exactly what was typed in to create these images and this is a great way to kind of give you that um I guess Peak behind the curtain of what words and phrases and all that kind of stuff and how that then relates to the image creation on the mid Journey side and in including these images you've also got a search prompts uh little section right here where you can type in certain prompts that you might uh or that you want to research so in this case we are looking at sports backgrounds like stadiums and stuff like that so I went ahead and typed in American football player running in a stadium and you can see the images that other people have already created using a similar style prompt and all you have to do is scroll over these images and you can get exactly what these folks type in uh in order to achieve these results and we can scroll down here and find certain images that might exactly replicate kind of what we're looking to do uh like here's a neat one with the stadium behind them so then we can click on this and get a bigger view his hands a little wacky here and you'll see some of this stuff in these image Generations uh but what this also does is gives us even more images to kind of Deep dive into and more prompts and and then you can what you can do is is either copy and paste these prompts right away or you can just kind of maybe take notes uh and figure out you know like I said this is kind of like a way to give you a head start and then you can take these over to the Discord server uh where it is that you interact with mid journey and these are some examples that I came up with just for the purposes of this video and you can see where I've typed in a photo portrait of a basketball player in an arena during a game and we got four different versions right here and I've found when I type in portrait it gives me uh usually tighter images so for reasons I guess for uh creating backdrops like we're looking to do usually want a little more room and then that's where you can go with like a full body portrait and you can see here some of these outputs uh and then back here uh I went back to another portrait just you know TR trying to see if I can detect the pattern and this is kind of where I've determined where when you type in uh photo portrait you're getting some tighter images uh and then you got waist up and you can do like midbody and you can like I said you can go back and look at those other prompts that people have used and see what their outputs are and that'll give you a good idea of kind of where to go to get the images that you're looking to get and then let me show you I'm going to scroll down here these are the settings I'm using I just pulled this up for y'all uh I'm using the latest model which is 5.2 uh there's some rumors that uh mid journey is going to be coming out with a version six here soon which uh it's amazing just how far this has come in the last couple months and I can only imagine what a version six would do but I did want to show uh some of uh the more recent updates that they provided for us and one of the main ones is this these upscale versions here so uh you can see once you upsize one of the uh versions of an image so I outputed these four here and then an upsize number four down here once you get this on its own then it gives you the option to upscale it two times or four times so the original files in mid Journey were not that big they're uh 1024 pixels by 1024 on average and with the upscale the two times upscale uh you can get them up to 2048 and then the upscale you uh 40 96 or in that kind of neighborhood depending on your aspect ratio so another huge advancement and speaking though of that huge advancement some of these renderings uh in mid Journey they're going to have some flaws and visual flaws like something weird maybe in the face so when you upssize those uh they will upssize those flaws but in our case where we're looking at these Stadium backdrops which are going to be generally soft focused somewhat blurred uh those uh flaws visual flaws are pretty much hidden in in most cases so uh for the purpose that we're using this for the this is a really nice addition so now that we kind of giving you a brief overview of mid Journey here let's jump over to photoshop and I'm going to show you uh this is a mid Journey image that I outputed and if it doesn't come across I'll I'll put it on the screen here the prompt the exact prompt I use but it's uh a photo of a single American football player running it might have had like in a stadium but I'll I'll put that there so you can see the output here and I've got it I used a 16x9 aspect ratio to give me a wide field of view here uh and he's basically isolated uh in this image and then let me speak too uh to um different things you can do with mid Journey you can use mid journey to Output images for mood boards that you can then take to uh your photo shoots and basically recreate certain images I'll go back and and show you so you know if you wanted like a a picture of you know a player at the back of his jersey you know looking in an arena you you could have your subject turn at this angle and basically recreate what mid journey is given you uh as a mood board and you obviously if you you save this file to a laptop or an iPad or or whatever it is that you show your mood boards to your subjects uh you can you know direct them show them these and and obviously you can output multiple different ones uh for you know different types of images that you want to get so this this could be a really neat Tool uh for mood boards and then secondly uh one of the toughest parts of creating composits back in the day was just figur out the composition of where to you know place your subject in relation to your background and if you get an output like this in mid Journey um obviously this is you know created from nothing uh and it looks pretty good I would probably zoom in a little bit on this one so if we come in you know something like this kind of take the feet out of out of the image which simplifies things in the composite world uh but this looks you know really nice and this is basically what I used when I created the thumbnail that you saw for this video and I'm going to show you right now so this let me turn the mask off so this is an image that I did earlier uh this year with the football team here and the one that I just pulled to use for uh this video and you can see when I stuck him in here I basically overlaid him uh closely to where uh the player that M Journey created um just overlaid him there I kind of centered him on this light Bank um here but then mid Journey kind of gave me the scaling that I'm using here so I I kind of know uh what size to make um my player here in relation to the background so I'm just using basically what mid what mid journey is giving me uh to create or giving me like a starting point for this composite so let's take this off I'm going to run through just real quick how I created uh that image that you saw on the thumb thumbnail and the first thing that we want to do is get rid of our player so in one of in my previous video that I did uh six months ago uh and I was having a hard time getting these Stadium backdrops without a player and I still am having a hard time doing it so uh basically I create uh these with the prompt that a player is on the field and it gives me that backdrop but previously uh we didn't have generative fill and I was using a um an older tool in Photoshop called content aware fill and that would only get me so far and then I was having to use the Clone stamp tool to correct some of the uh imperfections in using that a Content aware fill but now we've got generative fill in Photoshop and it is really amazing uh what it can do so all we have to do is create a selection around our subject we don't want to do uh the SE select subject because we want to leave some room between what it is that we are wanting to f fill and the background so Photoshop will have something to pull from when it creates the The Fill here and uh taking out our player and I'm just using the trackpad with one hand um here to make this selection so you can can you can see uh just this roughly done selection here I'm going to click generative fill I'm not going to put anything in there and hit generate and this is going to tell Photoshop to basically F take this player out and fill in the Stadium behind him and it'll give us three options so there we go three perfectly usable options uh to to complete the composite you can see where Photoshop actually added like a uh exit row there something kind of white I'm going to and then we got to remember we're going to stick our player like right over this anyway so it's uh it's pretty good right from start I'm going to use number three here and let's put our player so this is the the mask and I just did a quick quick uh select subject mask on our player and so then what I like to do is use another AI filter within Photoshop and it's in the neural filter section and I use this in my previous video and this is called harmonization and I'm going to hover over this and you can see exactly what it says uh harmonize the color and Luminosity of one layer to another layer to make a Flawless composite and you'll see it it gives you kind of a starting point but uh it'll we'll kind of dial in a little bit more of what after what it gives us so I'm already on the layer with the player so I'm going to select this layer to pull the colors from and you'll see here it's brought up the color of his jersey we're going to Output to a new layer and you can see what it did there in this case it changed the color and a little bit of contrast on his legs here uh but then what that's done is is take the color away away from kind of what the actual Jersey color is for uh this team so then what I'm going to do is probably come in here and adjust this Hue and saturation just a little bit bring that down and this is bringing down the whole saturation of the whole scene and but then that that takes that red down a little bit and brings this closer to what it is that you know what that Jersey normally looks like uh and so what I'm going to do here too is do just like a little color balance give us put a little cyan in the shadows maybe a little bit of blue and then the highlights I'm going to warm the highlights just a touch and so these two I'm just complete a group so you can kind of see where I've adjusted that a little bit further and obviously I'm trying to do this as quick as possible on uh for this the sake of this video full disclosure I did this earlier and it was like 20 plus minutes and I'm trying to do this a lot quicker uh but so zooming in I mean I feel like this is a really you know really neat image and I would probably bring this color probably tweak these colors a little bit more I did one earlier and this is kind of what I came up with here uh which I feel like is Blended a little bit better uh but you know you can spend as much time as you want on these and everything is obviously tweakable but that is really how uh fast I was able to to pretty much put this together so let's jump and I'll show you one more sample and and this will kind of show a little more of what we can do with the generative fill uh on the Photoshop end of thing so what I've got here take this down so what I've got here is the output from mid journey and it's a photo portrait of an NBA player on a court during a game is is what I uh feel like that the rest of that prompt is and you can see I've got uh you know a really nice and 16 by9 aspect ratio a lot of background to work with what I came across though is the image I wanted to drop in is this image here and her arm I liked just the size of her like this and her arm was a little bit too tall uh for you know what what I outputed in mid Journey so then what I was able to do after I generated him or I filled him out of the the backdrop and then what I did is increased the size of the uh the canvas and then I'll show you real quick and then you just make a selection over that area that you want to fill and then you just hit gener fill and it did exactly what I was asking it to and then there was another step here where I wasn't a big fan of this big this solo big light and so then I made a selection I'll show you right here I made a selection over here and then hit gener fill and then I added in Arena lights there and so it gave me the string of lights uh that really looked a lot better I feel than what it was before that's before and then that's after the arena lights that I put in in Photoshop and then I dropped my player in I did uh a neural filter on her and then I added uh like I did in that other one I did a little color balance uh did a little curves adjustment and then another curves adjustment I'll just show you these so I I brought her down just a little bit exposure wise on both of these um brought the the basketball down right there and put in some shadowing on one side of her and then I added a little bit of a flare over her arm kind of brings in this smoke a little bit more and then added like a blue soft light layer over the top and that kind of gives an overall kind of color uh cast on this image and uh I think I feel like that kind of brings it all together but once again that was basically the same process that I used in the uh image before it's just really neat to have uh a tool like mid Journey at at our disposal where we can create these unique backdrops without actually having to go to them and photograph them uh or go online and pull stock images uh that type of thing so it's uh such a a neat creat ative Tool uh that I feel like you know the only limit is our imagination when it comes to putting these types of images together so I'm hoping that this shows y'all some of the possibilities uh at this point in time where the technology is and who knows where it's going to be in another six months uh it's just incredible where it's come in the last six months they were just tools that I just used right now that were not available uh 6 months ago so it's pretty exciting um if you ask me I feel like it's worth it to kind of be in this in you know kind of educating yourself with this type of stuff even though it does uh cost a little bit of money and but I just you know in some aspects I feel like it's it's more important to kind of be on The Cutting Edge of this type of thing and not uh I guess holding yourself back when it comes to certain tools that are available for everyone out there now so if you feel like this video was uh worthy please give it that thumbs up and you want to see more content like this hit that little subscribe button and the Bell next to it so YouTube will actually let you know when I'm here in the meantime y'all can follow me on social media on Instagram at quants photo and on uh xit qu photo as well as prite mods on Instagram y'all stay safe and healthy out there and I will see youall again soon in the next [Applause] [Music] one

Channel: James Quantz Jr

Views: 4,273

Keywords: photography, prolightmods, Westcott, photoshoot, studio lighting, behind the scenes, quantzphoto, canonr5, midjourney, AI, photoshop

Id: brpHYKpW0hQ

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023