Put Your Creativity Where Your AI Is

It’s one thing to do the research and write a blog and newsletter encouraging our wonderful readers to jump into the AI waters and swim with the big fish. But it’s a whole ‘nother school of fish to start dipping our toes into its creative waters ourselves.

So, it’s time to jump in.

We (sort of) randomly picked one of the AI creative tools we mentioned in the recent post AI Art: Your New Teaching Assistant for Creative Learning. To be honest, “(sort of) randomly” means we chose one that was free. Don’t want to start out spending money on something that might be a bad fit, right? Or, worse yet, be so far above our skillset that the monthly fee will simply be a cruel reminder of how much we have to learn in the AI world.

Adobe Firefly looked appealing.

Our first thought: holy crap, this stuff is amazing! People (um, and AI) can really create all this?

Second thought: how can we ever learn how to do this?

Well, prompt by prompt, my friend.

What we’ve learned:

IT’S FREE!

The basic version of Adobe Firefly is free. There are, of course, other products as your skillset expands. Still, free is a great start.

IT WORKS IN A LOT OF PLACES

Firefly powers generative AI features for Adobe creative apps, including:

• the Firefly web app
• Photoshop
• Premier Pro
• InDesign
• Lightroom
• Adobe Express
• Adobe Illustrator
• InDesign

IT’S NOT JUST A TEXT-TO-GOOFY PICTURE THING

• Text to Image is just what it seems. (Yeah, we said it was more than that …. but have you SEEN the images in their gallery? Click here to take a look.
• Generative Fill creates photorealistic images.
• Generative Extend is a video editing tool that is game-changing for reframing, audio, transcription, editing and more.
• Generative Video uses text prompts to create video clips.

IT’S ALL IN THE PROMPT … AND YOUR IMAGINATION

As we looked closer at the images in the gallery, all of them were stunningly beautiful. Some images were of ordinary things, like a bulldog (granted, she was wearing a princess crown) to the beyond-the-imagination-extraordinary, such as a frog in its habitat encased in a single drop of water.

It all depends on your prompt and how far you go with your imagination.

Some prompts were short and simple and still came out really cool:

•  Victoria White: beautiful winter day, cardinal bird, snowing
• William Phillips: A poorly wombat in bed wearing a shawl

Others were surprisingly detailed … which (we think) truly enhanced the outcome. Here are a few prompt examples:

• Bill Kirst: A nordic style coffee shop set in the galley of a spaceship with a view of the galaxy, hyper realistic
• Jose Lopez: Gothic woman heads to a most sinister medieval castle. The sun manages to let its colored rays pass through.
• Aleksandra Bogoboyaschaya: Character Girl with big eyes, with orange and white flowers in the form of a wreath in her hair, hair curly, in a long dress with flowers, a white face with patterns, a skeleton on a white background with a white mirror floor

Deep Breath and Jump!

We’d love to show you all the images people shared on Firefly, but we weren’t sure about copyrights and all that.

Well, plus, the whole point of this adventure was to try it ourselves.

[deep breath] And so here we go …

Ok, we can do this …

1. Since we wanted to start simple, we stuck to the Text to Image feature today.
2. The prompt bar kindly asks, “Describe the image you want to generate.” We typed in a prompt: show a 3D cartoon character of a young girl alligator dressed like a pirate on a ship in the canals of the San Antonio Riverwalk.
3. We hit the Generate button and held our breath.
4. A popup asked us to sign in or create an account. Dang. Well, it was pretty easy to set up at least.
5. Then another popup, offering me the Adobe Express Premium Plan for a monthly fee. We Xd out.
6. Back at the drawing board, the next message was about not having enough credits and suggesting the Premium Plan. With saddened hearts, we couldn’t find our way to the free version.

 Dang.

1. We went back to our browser, typed in “ChatGPT images” and was directed to its Image Generator page.
2. We cut and pasted in the same prompt: show a 3D cartoon character of a young girl alligator dressed like a pirate on a ship in the canals of the San Antonio Riverwalk.
3. And this popped up:

 Hahaha! It’s great!

 So … in this first dive into creating AI images, we learned some valuable tips:

•  It takes a bit of time to figure it out.
• The possibilities are way past amazing to astounding.
• Be prepared to pay for what you want: the convenience, the cool factor and the breathtaking results. Fair enough.
• But, still, sometimes there’s a simple solution. (PS: However, we were only able to create three images on ChatGPT today. It invited us to come back tomorrow. See the bullet just above this one.)

Looks like we’ll be back for another try very soon. In the meantime, we’ll hang our latest creation on the office wall.

Our suggestion to you: dive in, the water’s fine. You'll  never know what you can create if you aren't willing to risk getting your toes nibbled by a fish.

Yep, we created this, too. (Prompt: create a colorful image of a woman who is part butterfly, set in a verdant jungle.) Bam!

Learn More

From awards to partnerships to new features, Firefly has a lot going on. Click here to read more.

Visit the Firefly Gallery to be astounded and inspired!

Resources:

• We created the images of the alligator pirate, butterfly woman and racing mice using ChatGPT.
• The llama in curlers image is from Andrian Mart from Pixabay.
• The AI Generator prompt examples are from Firefly.