It was more than interesting. I came out of COVID to hit 12 hour days straight through the weekend. I made the truck just barely in time, and when HR fell short (again!) I ended up making my flight and hotel reservations at the very last minute and out of my own pocket, too.
Not exactly a proper recovery period.
Got to LA and got the install finished that I've been sweating about since, oh, February. All my gambles and improvisations seem to have paid off, and the client was happy. And I collapsed. Barely dragged in to the last work day of the year to turn in my receipts.
I had to take an extra week off work to recover. I might even want another one; as I've finally started feeling human again I've dug into long put-off projects. Talked to my long-suffering cover artist and made up a new scheme I really like. Working my way through all the covers to see if that idea works, then on to do the repaint to make the stock image model look properly on-model to my cover girl.
(Who isn't exactly Penny, any more than the incidents or settings are literal. I'm smarter than that. Covers are to sell an idea, not to be a document of what is inside.)
Which means I've been coming to grips with the latest iteration of PhotoShop, which has made some large changes to the workspace and has also added some crazy new tools. I find it annoying how much they are overselling their new Generative Fill, for instance -- rather like those annoying Grammerly ads -- but, sheesh, the Firefly AI is insane!
Thing that it misses, though, is what I can do in my Stable Diffusion workflow (which I only do for personal use...so far. There's some gray areas, well, more like turgid smelly gray-green areas, in the use of AI tools within the workflow of producing commercial art.) What I can do in Stable Diffusion is drop a few blobs of paint -- seriously, the most low-rent comes-with-Windows pixel-pusher program -- and tell Stable Diffusion what it is supposed to be seeing.
It is an interesting insight into the mind of the machine as you try to predict how it is going to read the blobs. There's that balance between having the artistic eye to know how things actually look, especially in the gross scale; not like a child's drawing of a bicycle that has cranks and handlebars and spokes but they are sort of all over the place in different places and scales. More like a Picasso bull, where the essence of the animal, attitude and all, is captured in a couple of triangle.
And against knowing what the training material contains (remembering things like celebrities and fashion are going to be over-represented in the training data), and the psychology of the people who did the training and what words they chose for the prompts.
In any case, PhotoShop and Firefly haven't yet given that aspect; where you can tell it to look at the underlying material, select how much to keep what is there and how much to pay attention to the prompts instead. Plus the variety of Control Nets, which provide another layer of dial-in selectivity as to detecting poses or contours or whatever. PhotoShop is drifting too much in the Apple Computer mode, which sadly with the increasing power (and the almost inevitable lack of transparency that comes with tools that are too esoteric in their mathematics but rather more importantly, grown via genetic algorithms and similar) is presented in a black-box manner where what it will do is what the designers presume most people want it to do. Which is right enough of the time to make the software spectacular, but when you happen to want something that lies outside those limits...
So anyhow. I stopped off to make this post as I was finally visiting Adobe's font library, which comes with the whole Creative Commons pay-every-month license that is the only way to have PhotoShop these days.
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Oh, yeah. And while I was very sick, I couldn't even think straight enough to follow the plot of a movie. But I could hang out in the Zen-like experience of Satisfactory. My current world is starting to look half-way nice and I may make a quick tour video some day.
One more thing on the list of "god, I need a couple months off work to handle all this!"
Well, that and not being so sick I can't even sleep...
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