AI Visual Horizon, Dispel?

The other day at one of my former assemblies I frequent, I brought up with the pillars of that small flock the possibility of me doing a couple of paintings of Jesus for the décor in some appropriate place. One of the Lord in the garden before His arrest, the other depicting His baptism with John the Baptist.

Okay, the responses landed on a strong positive. So, back in the art room to try to redeem the time, I assigned several specifics to AI to come up and provide me with a rough draft with which to work from.

Sequence of layering in this rough-draft:

1 A Jerusalem night-scene of a dense garden with a clearing in the center.
2 A left-side of Jesus knelt in prayer looking up and concerned. (Rendered upper body only)
3 A second left-side of Jesus knelt in prayer looking up and concerned (Rendered a full-B white marble)
4 Capture and create a left-side life-like facial image of the Shroud of Turin

Four layers in my photo software and was happy with the first three but became unsettled when trying to put the image from the shroud in place. Something was up and I didn’t feel right. Then it dawned on me, have they already done it? Have they assigned AI to create not only a still, but a moving picture film of the Man of the Shroud?

Below is the first three layers. Should such a movie if it ever came to be, signal alarm for the Church or excitement that brought the image of the Shroud of Turin to walk, talk and perform?

Love the artwork.

Ray Downing produced the image of Jesus he'd extrapolated from the shroud.

So,if you feel led,why not?

What photo software do you work in that allows for layers? I use photoshop...

Interesting project, and lovely that your church agreed. Quite the undertaking for you, also...

I have been using a generator and tried some prompts which rendered these (just a few samples):

They are from a free generator that has much trouble with faces and hands especially, and
I sometimes get three-armed figures, or an extra hand peeking out of a sleeve. LOL. Plus
the images are fairly small, (1024 x 1024 @72 ppi). I sized them down for here:





I have no idea how many toes this one has, and as you can see, praying posture is not very well understood by AI.

I can appreciate the point in your question. One that identifies one half of this wrangling within me. Part of me would like to unfurl to the uncharterd limits, the other to stay close to the more universally accepted so as not to stray from the text of thought, '', , whatsoever is lovely, , think about such things'' (Phil 4:8) To be honest, I'm leaning towards the beautiful side than to the possibility of being responsible for a project that began to pick up some form of foggy veneration. Yet, if your like myself, I believe God has preserved for us the Shroud's darkly image and thank Him for it.

Oh my my my! Amazing contemplation! Thanks!

Oh Magenta! First off, I think it safe to say the community here is so blessed to be graced with your many graphics which are nothing short of fine art! And the above are more to transport us to somewhere we would otherwise won't likely experience anywhere else. Thank you!
As do I In the late 90s to 2000s I became frustrated with Corel's lack. Jumped into a college class and got Illustrator and self-taught myself in Photoshop and haven't looked back (only briefly).
Thanks, I'll post the projects here when completed. I got my feet wet in the mid 1960s when my school friends would by my ilustrations, fast-forward 25yrs and I was painting billboard murals in outdoor advertising studios which surrendered the market to the massive vinyl prints. So, it was naturally back to the private canvas. Glad to have other artsy types around!

Thank you so much for your very kind words!
How very interesting! I was "exposed" to photoshop use in the early 2000s also, through my job, and though using it was not part of my job description, I did tinker with it and could perform simple touch-ups and sizing type of functions to prep files for printing, such as flattening layers, turning off alpha channels, no LZW compression, and making sure the file was in the correct colour space, for we have always printed RGB and not CMYK or Adobe 98 (as far as I know). Etc. I did love to play with and in it right away, and I did do massive touch-ups for friends; one was an image that was severely damaged when removed from behind glass: several figures on horses lined up along the beach went missing. LOL. Anyways, I have worked in three different photo labs after discovering my love of printing in college, where we studied photography once a week. Like you I have not really had any formal training in the use of photoshop. I may really only know a very small fraction of the program, but it is enough that I can do what I do, and I do appreciate you letting me know you appreciate my efforts. Just the other night someone came against me with condemnation for the fact that I sign my designs with "love Magenta." LOL! We get all types here, and it is yes, a definite pleasure to meet another visually creative person! PS~ I have never used Corel or Illustrator or Lightroom or anything like that. Just photoshop from the beginning, although, oh! I did use a free online editor for a time, when I first started tinkering to make Scripture panels back in 2018. It was called Pixlr, and was very much like photoshop, though not exactly (for instance it would auto crop a layer if it extended beyond the canvas size, which meant you could not go back later if you wanted to reposition it). Still, that was prtetty amazing. I took a hiatus in the spring of 2018 and so I was not designing during that time... and when I came back a couple of moths later, Pixelr had gone offline. When they came back they were so dumbed down they were useless to me.
You have had a very long career and been very productive in the arts! I look forward to seeing your images progress if you share that process with us, and I wish you well in the rendering! Here is one of my latest panels, and I just realized I had used the verse from 1 John 3 previously, though I had mostly forgotten about this panel. Some rarely get posted, though I must admit, I get a kick out of the giraffes in this one (from three years ago) and then also the newer one from 1 John 3, which I think I began five days ago:


1 John 3:1~ Behold what manner of Love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.


1 John 3:1b-2 and from Philippians 3:21 ~ We should be called children of God. And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.

I am not sure why but the images are not showing up in my preview, though they hopefully should eventually...

The original figure/face looked like this, and I also made the gown more modest, as AI does not know what modesy is either:

Well, they finally did show up for me and are spectacular. Thank you. Uh, been a busy week as my old employer keeps pulling me out of retirement (cabinetry shop finisher/color coordinator), a near full week at that. So, I'll be touching on some of those things soon, ,

I’ll have to get back with you on all that, so interesting! Oh yes, I’ve got some major Photoshop voids myself. But, being the workhorse it is, suits me fine as far as I can tell. Watch, I’ll throw out some things that I think are phozowy, and then some Photoshop ‘hairyleg’ comes by and lowers the roof on me Ha!

Here is the second rough-draft of Jesus’ Baptism. AI wanted to cause light rain to fall when all I asked for was a depiction showing Jesus coming up out of the water:




Three layers, 1 The dove, 2 John (who looks like he stopped off to pick up a new wardrobe), and 3 Jesus and all creation. To be continued, ,

Thank you for sharing your process with me, your layering is amazing! Do you use layer masks? I have never learned how to do that. Sometimes when I am moving a layer down I accidentally hit that option but then I turn it off because I do not really know how it works, and I am usually too focused powering through whatever I am doing to stop and try to figure it out LOL. I have animated a few of my panels also, by making them gifs, but I do it so seldom I always have to look up the process, because if I don't I choose the wrong one of the two options for animating frames and then it takes me forever trying to figure out how to undo that and select the other one! Generally speaking animating panels I found to be not such a great idea because moving parts is too distracting from the text, but I always did like this one

I decided to animate the frame because I liked both of them equally (LOL)!
I started with this face and tinkered with it for quite some time...

Do you build cabinets? A wood worker? That is so cool! I was called out of retirement also, though I had originally been involuntarily retired with the covid closures, right after turning 65 and getting a cancer diagnosis, which gave me plenty of time to go through my treatments and surgeries and healing etc. When my boss called me just over 2.5 years later to ask me back, my initial reaction was more along the lines of, are you kidding me? I am retired! LOL. But I let him know later the same day that I would agree to his offer of three days a week, six hour days. It is perfect for me! He also gave me a fairly substantial raise, and that is very helpful in today's economic climate. And there is no escaping the fact that I have always loved what I do! Photofinishing is called a twilight industry because the sun does seem to be setting on it, and yet we manage to stay busy throughout the year, especially with school/student printing. The work ebbs and flows, and when we are not busy I am free to do as I will on my laptop, which is great...

Honestly, nor do I. Only in AI (Adobe Illustrator). First off, I'm wayy off the popular Adobe subscription releases. Both my AI & A-Photoshop are happily on disc. A-Illustrator 10 & Photoshop 7. AP7 does come with the mask option but went around that by if need be select Image>Duplicate, hit the ''ALT'' button >Make. Then grab the Stamp tool>reduce it to 1-pixel and select some hard edge in the new window and paint it in the original window in it's own layer. My big repeat regret is I somehow convince myself to flatten an area that never should have and makes life miserable once I discover I'm wayy past the allowable number of redo/backward steps. Argh! My best tudor has been the Photoshop Bible by Deke McClelland. I know I'm missing some enormous advantages by those later releases, but on the economic side, it gets me through knowing, from those days spent on hand-eye dexterity at the designing table, technology is a no-brainer.
OMG! Remember when we first started seeing gifs, how clunky they were when handled as though a heaven-sent/scent? But your right, spoken right out of yesterday's sign-shop competence; let the mind flow through the image without having to deal with the ''circus'' In your panels case, permissibly understood.
A few cabinets, but, the monetarily speaking, would prefer wood sculptures, but not as proficient as painting.
Have mercy Lord! Trust things have improved for you? Right enough about economics. Good for the ol' account.
Well, what I gather from those I've run into, the one I need to investigate is ''Lightroom'' for reasons that have escaped me, one, I believe is the advantages it offers in working with raw images. But by now, the market the pro SLR photographer used to hold over his digital counterpart competitor seems to have closed shut. 10 years ago, maybe so but, the war over hue/pixel vs raw has finally ended. Is that where the industry stands against the old favorite - ''raw image''?

Your dream being expressed to me directly, or by someone else brings me no such conviction I had (Thank you Lord) while using the shroud's face.
Disney Studios once said their intent in robotics was focused on arriving at a point of ''seamless'' detection from other human life characteristics. Vigilance is the only thing that can endure the idolatry about to be unleashed.


The early Church was capable of being led astray by speechless idols? Then how much more when they try to mimic the apple of His eye?