Goat Trail Revisited
In my recent post about the Goat Trail, Leigh from Five Acres & a Dream made the comment about how much she liked the layers of the rock. I responded that I had more dramatic pictures showing the layers but they had others in them that I didn't want to post pictures. If you recall, I hung back and didn't go on this portion of the hike and so these pictures were taken by my youngest daughter.
I no longer have photo editing software up to the task of editing photos since Adobe Lightroom decided to make my lifetime purchase of their program obsolete and force me to go to a subscription model which I detest. But A.I. has gotten a lot better and a fairly recent post by Kay over at Musings about the capabilities of it got me to thinking. Could A.I. be up to the task?
So I pulled up Google Gemini, uploaded my picture and asked it to replace the humans in the photo with proportionally sized goats. It dutifully did but they ended up being the same size as the humans. I asked it to reduce the size of the goats by 50% and it did nothing. After several attempts, I told it to scale down the "goat" by 50% and it dutifully did... the goat in the foreground. The goat in the background of the picture is still the size of a human but it limits attempts so it will stay that way for now.
But the above picture with the A.I. added goats, should give you a sense of the scale of the Goat Trail and how exposed it becomes in places.
Below is the first picture I edited to replace the human with a goat and it too was the size of a human until I went through several attempts to finally get it scaled correctly but left a weird shadow behind the goat. I tried to get A.I. to reduce the shadow but every attempt erased the goat too so I eventually left it alone.
Overall, I am quite impressed on how A.I. was able to edit these photos in ways I don't have the capabilities to do anymore. I think it is good enough, that I really don't need photo editing software at all and can just let A.I. do the work meaning Adobe won't be getting any subscription monies from me anytime soon!
Yesterday, I did some AI photo restoration in Adobe using AI or partly using AI. It worked better than my previous attempts not using AI. But sometimes AI just gets my goat, y’know? :)
ReplyDeleteBeing my first attempt at, A.I. certainly got my attention.
DeleteInteresting! I use Gimp which is open source and does a decent job of what I want it to do (and with no cost or fees, although I only use a fraction of its capabilities). With it, I could replace a human with a goat, but it would be a laborious manual undertaking.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the trend to turn everything into a cash cow. Seems kind of jerky on their part for not honoring the lifetime purchase, but that's the way things are. The consumers only recourse is to not participate. But of that, they really don't seem to care.
I have Gimp but can just barely use it. I need to take lessons on it.
DeleteYouTube!
DeleteThat is the easy part. Carving out enough day and patience to watch, learn and then try it out while still fresh in my mind is the hard part!
DeleteThat's a clever way to replace humans! I could never handle that trail; I'm too terrified of heights.
ReplyDeleteI have a healthy dislike of heights too but have walked across the face a good number of times over the years.
DeleteHmmmm. Well, this is food for thought. I also have a Lightroom subscription but I'm not sure I'm ready to hand over my photos to AI for editing. I like to have more control than that!
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, AI did a good job on that first photo. I would never have suspected that wasn't a real goat.
I was impressed though when it came to scaling things, it had issues. If I were doing more editing, a subscription would definitely be worth it.
DeleteAs much as I hate most AI, I have to admit this turned out nicely.
ReplyDeleteI have not found much use for AI in my life yet outside of transcribing hand written documents, but this may be the exception for the time being.
DeleteInteresting Ed. I have never thought of using AI for photo editing.
ReplyDeleteThe subscription model is omnipresent; I suspect at some point some companies will rue starting down that path. As you indicate, if the choice is between do without and pay, more and more will do without.
I am trying to whittle away at what few subscriptions I currently have. I'm down to I think two categories. One is for my genealogy interests and the other is for entertainment, i.e. streaming movies/television/books etc. I just lied, I have a third and that is for computing needs which is my internet, cloud storage and password manager subscriptions. There sadly is probably more if I were to sit down and put my mind to it.
DeleteEd, I think we are similar. We have a single streaming service. I have a service related subscription for a VPN and I believe we have a music account as well. And extra storage for pictures on the phone...it keeps going.
DeleteInterestingly, magazine and newspaper subscriptions have been replaced with these sorts of things.
I had that lifetime Lightroom too. Disgusting what they want to charge now. I have tried very little photo software since that time. If I need something edited I send it to Jen and tell her what I want!
ReplyDeleteI expect they lost a lot of customers with their greed.
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