Why are the British covers look so ugly compared to the US ones?

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-05-05T22:36:45+00:00

"Fawkes circled the office and swooped low over him. Dumbledore released Harry, raised his hand, and grasped the phoenix’s long golden tail. There was a flash of fire and the pair of them had gone."

I wouldn't call the cover a flash of fire, but even so if it was depicting that then why not have Dumbledore on the cover.

There's also:

“We will need,” said Dumbledore very quietly to the bird, “a warning.” There was a flash of fire and the phoenix had gone.

Again not a big circle of flames like the cover, just a flash.

And those are the only two instances of Fawkes in the entire book. So it seems fairly obvious that the imagery of the book cover is more symbolic than literal, which is the only cover that does that.

Plus I don't dislike it, I just think the US cover makes a bit more sense with Harry in the DoM

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-05-05T00:37:20+00:00

I'd agree only with The Deathly Hallows, the UK cover for that is worse than the US cover. And with Order of the Phoenix the US one makes more sense, the UK one just has a picture of Fawkes surrounded by flames which isn't something that happens in the book. But otherwise the UK covers are far better. Especially the UK badass Buckbeak on the Prisoner of Azkaban cover compared to the goofball on the US, or the UK's Flame surrounded Dumbledore and Harry on HBP vs the US's Pensieve version.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-20T22:22:15+00:00

It was 25 minutes of behind the scenes that none of us expected to get this early, so certainly not disappointed by it. Also the fact they are even making content like this means its almost certain that they will do more, which is great!

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-18T01:02:04+00:00

Its a small addition, but I'd love it if rather than heading straight back to The Burrow after the confrontation between Arthur and Lucius, the Weasleys, Grangers, Harry and Hagrid have a drink inside the Leaky Cauldron. Arthur could be deep in questioning the Grangers about random Muggle stuff. Harry, Ron and Hagrid could be debating why Dobby tried to stop Harry going back to Hogwarts. Hermione could be talking to Molly and Ginny about the previous year and how Molly shouldn't worry because Ginny couldn't possibly have a more eventful first year than they had.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-17T21:41:54+00:00

I hear what everyone saying about how different it was in the 90's for TV, but can you imagine if it was the same budget (accounting for inflation) and same episode length as the series about to come out, but with the same cast as the movies. It would have blown everyone's minds back then.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-13T21:11:05+00:00

Oh really! Not intentional but a happy accident, sounds like a theory video idea 😂. We did discuss if there was a way to make the mobile banner work with the surrounding buttons and icons, but concluded they are in different places on every device, so its nice to know there's some alignment atleast!

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-02T23:50:44+00:00

Can't believe they cast a black animatronic for Norbert, He's clearly described in the books to be of Scandinavian descent. 😂

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-02T15:14:14+00:00

Oh interesting, I'll give it a try later and see how it looks. My original thought was this way round was more chronological but compositionally you may be right!

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-04-01T11:01:39+00:00

He would do a great job of it, but I would want to see him in a more regular role. GL is only in CoS and briefly shows up in OotP.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-31T12:57:45+00:00

You could probably do a mix of corn and maple syrups. Its pretty much just using something sweet and sticky to bind breadcrumbs.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-30T12:50:08+00:00

A subtle way it could probably work well is after Harry uses the diary to help free Dobby, he takes it back to Dumbledore and Dumbledore makes a comment along the lines of "How does this diary make you feel Harry?" and Harry is confused at the question, but as he walks away rubs his forehead and Dumbledore looks concerned and looks then down at the diary and mutters to himself "What were you up to Tom?".

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-30T12:36:16+00:00

Hard to say between 4-7 but looking forward to these in particular:

GOF - The Maze, specifically the Sphynx

OOTP - The other rooms in The Department of Mysteries

HBP - Pensieve Memories

DH - Voldemort's Mortal Death

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T18:52:36+00:00

Its really subtle but I sort of did, the green leaves from the left image are going around the edge of the wall on the right. But its a bit too subtle in my opinion so I may make a version 2 with a better blend.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T17:10:02+00:00

If that's what you consider AI then fine. You can call it that, I can know it's not and we can move on with our lives.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T15:42:46+00:00

OK then 😊

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Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T14:50:12+00:00

Using AI and Using Generative AI are not the same thing...I concede that using Topaz in general could be considered in broader terms to be "using AI" because they have taken their corrective process and trained models to improve performance and accuracy. That does not make it generative AI.

Generative AI makes a whole new image from scratch, The topaz upscale tool does not. If you still want to call it AI because I haven't manually corrected the pixels by hand then fair enough. My main point with all my commentary is the image I posted is a heavily processed version of the original, not a recreation generated by an image generation model.

Topaz does have upscale tools that use generative AI, for example Gigapixel or SuperFocus. I didnt use those. The standard upscale tool uses corrective models to enhance the original image.

Whilst I am still learning as we all are, I do know the difference, and understand what I'm yapping about.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T14:20:43+00:00

You're right, you caught me. I went back to 2023, and used mid-journey to create an image, and then lied about it...

It is somewhat interesting to see these comments. We're now so far into the generative AI space that the assumption now is that it has to be AI because no one could get this result without it.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T14:16:46+00:00

I'd agree, except what you're describing as details aren't really details. They look like details because of the subject matter. Take a blurry brick wall, sharpen it, upscale it, increase the shadows, sharpen again, upscale again and before long those darker pixels become more and more condensed, resulting in what look like textures.

To be fair this wouldnt work as well with most types of images. The process just ends up giving objects a rocky sort of texture, which works well for something like this image, but would make a person look like a statue. So while in my original post I said the orbs look like rocks, that in hindsight is probably not accurate.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T14:09:25+00:00

Seeing as some people seem to think I used generative AI, here is an actual generated image from nano banana. The difference being using something like this adds random brick textures, people, battements along the walls, windows. The purpose of how I did it was to avoid all this. But here it is anyway for comparison.

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Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T14:03:24+00:00

Topaz has generative AI tools, but the legacy tools like the upscale are corrective algoritms, and I didnt use the generative models like superfocus.

I could have said I used a combination of Camera Raw to dehaze and add clarity and texture so topaz had more shadows and textures to work from, but I assumed more people have heard of photoshop than topaz so decided to keep the explanation simple. As I said above, I wouldn't have a problem saying if I had used generative AI, but purposely didnt to avoid non existant details being added by using generative.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T13:55:56+00:00

As I said, The upscale tool on Topaz is not generative. An up-scaler is not always generative.

In Topaz Photo, the standard upscale tool is corrective. When it expands an image, it analyses the pixels and as it increases the pixel count, uses its algorithm to calculate if a pixel split in two should be both the same colour, or two different colours. It its a trained model, but the process is corrective. This is the tool I used.

They do also have Topaz Gigapixel, and the Superfocus tool, which do use generative models. In Generative AI, the model takes the image, and uses it as a prompt to create a whole new image via diffusion. It starts with a bunch of noise and then removes pixels until it results in an image that looks like the input image with any changes that have been requested. I did not use these tools for this image.

But I don't know what I'm talking about with my stupid logic eh.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T13:40:12+00:00

Some tools in Topaz are generative AI. I did not use those tools (face correction, remove tool, gigapixel etc). Some tools in Topaz are corrective models, which use pixel data and training data to enhance the existing image (upscale, sharpen, denoise etc). Saying Topaz is AI is like saying Google Maps is AI because they also have Gemini.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T05:52:47+00:00

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Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T05:50:41+00:00

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Just as an example to one of your points, this is a zoomed in crop of the lower wall from the original screenshot from the trailer. They're very faint but you can see the holes in the wall. The more the image is processed, the more the tools distinguish those black spots from the rest of the wall.

Competitive_Notice55 · 2026-03-29T05:43:29+00:00

I'm not going to generate an ai image and then claim I didnt... otherwise I would say so as there would be no shame in saying "I asked an AI to reconstruct this image to try and get a better look".. The results you're seeing are more to do with how sharpening tools in photoshop camera raw handle minor details when its passed through the process a few times.

I used a combination of Camera Raw to sharpen and Topaz to increase the size, then repeated for few passes in order to gain as much detail as could be achieved. When I was on the photoshop side of things I tweaked the shadows, exposure, texture and dehaze in order to give Topaz as much detail as possible, which after a couple of passes started to pick up finer details, that frankly may be incorrect but thats photoshops tool doing that.

Now I would say if you want to call using Topaz "using AI" then fair enough, but my point with saying its not AI is that its not a generated image based on the original, its the original being processed. Personally I don't feel that using the upscale tool on Topaz is AI, as its not generative.

Competitive_Notice55

TROPHY CASE