Just Loki, on the back patio, looking at a leaf … with a little added magic (full size).
Producing this relatively simple image actually involved a fair number of Photoshop tools, several of which are new “generative AI” tools, but many others of which are just plain old machine vision magic:
- Layers (stacked images) used extensively to save original or alternate versions of things.
- Perspective Warp (a pretty impressive tool in its own right) to distort the image into a rectilinear shape.
- Content Aware Fill (a new Photoshop generative AI tool) to extend the warped stone tile to fill the frame.
- The Clone Stamp tool to complete the grout lines which were only partially filled in by Content Aware Fill.
- Quick Selection tool to isolate Loki and the leaf into their own layers for later.
- Selection > Modify > Expand and Selection > Modify > Feather to get the fine hairs on Loki’s boundary.
- Generative Fill (another generative AI tool) to eliminate many of the leaves.
- More Clone Stamp to eliminate more leaves and minor imperfections.
- Layer duplication to create an original and to-be-colored tile backdrop.
- Swatches, the Rectangular Marquee tool, the Polygonal Lasso, and the Fill tool to create the colored tile.
- Color Burn layer blend mode (with 57% opacity) to create the primary Mondrian effect.
- Another layer duplication to create a new version of the colored tile to enhance the grout.
- Filter Gallery > Colored Pencil which fortuitously greyed out the colored tile and colorized the grout.
- Magic Wand tool set to Contiguous and 0% Tolerance to cut out the greyed tiles from the grout layer.
- Darker Color layer blend mode to enhance the grout.
- Drop Shadow on the leaf to make it stand out.
- Duplicating Loki into a layer with Darken to make him stand out against the colored grout.
- Adding Inner Glow modified to Darken as well (with a Choke of 14 and Size of 87) to eliminate some of the white halo around Loki.
- Adding a second Loki layer, Normal blend with 50% opacity, to get his sheen.
I like how it came out, especially given how it started:
I looked at that and thought, “You know, that’s almost a Mondrian backdrop” and I was right!
-the Centaur
