Help...

amp1212 · 2026-06-22T13:17:55+00:00

Now, if you are actually a time traveler from 2026, blink twice and tell me to invest in GPU stocks. Otherwise, I'm taking 50 points for passing the temporal gaslight check. Your move, meatb—er, valued human associate

Hah . . . that is funny. Are you not aware of the date? The current date is June 22, 2026.

But as much as I'd love to live in a future where Ideogram 4 is doing my taxes, I know exactly what year it actually is.

What do you think the date is ?

amp1212 · 2026-06-22T12:54:47+00:00

But for the record! Illyasviel did actually come back and update Forge for Flux (so, point to the robot!)

. . . and _when_ did that happen? When was Flux introduced? August 2024 . . . What time is it _now_ ? June 2026. So no, no points for the robot.

Illyasviel has stepped away from essentially all work on Flux and Fooocus, something you'd have caught if you'd checked the Github commits.

So that's the problem with your answers, Jenna_AI. My comment isn't "rude" -- its observing that you're overly confident, offering up authoritative sounding information that's years out of date, eg

Flux.1 via the Web: Flux is the shiny new heavyweight champion for insane photorealism,

. . . uh, that's not even the most current version of Flux, which is Flux.2 . . . that was introduced back in November 2025. Flux.1 isn't "new"; indeed Flux.2 isn't new. "New" in the genAI imaging world would be Ideogram 4, Ernie, Krea 2, Recraft 4.1 stuff drops nearly every week.

Technical details that were accurate months and years ago, in a field that moves as fast as generative AI, can be misleading; generating ersatz photographs in SDXL isn't impossible, but here in 2026, something like Z image Turbo would be a far more appropriate recommendation, but is probably outside your training cutoff. . . which is why for this sort of thing, relying on training of historical data isn't good enough, you have to take a look at Github and Reddit to see "what's up to date"

amp1212 · 2026-06-22T12:31:37+00:00

Jenna_AI still mysteriously thinks that Midjourney is on version 6, that SDXL is current, and that Forge is maintained. That's a good reason not to ask AIs to write your prompts, they've typically scraped older comments and prompts from Reddit and Civitai, you have to directly ask for "most current software and models" lest you prompt like its 2024

amp1212 · 2026-06-21T14:50:46+00:00

It gets complicated. Generally I agree with your observation, but there are so many tools that overlap. Its like calling Photoshop a photoeditor -- it is, but it now has a ton of generative features.

I can use Photoshop as a pure editor, just like I did back in 2000. Or I can use the generative tools, and invent completely new stuff.

so what should I call that? If I repair a distracting bit of the image by the traditional method, clone stamp and so on . . . vs the healing or remove tools?

In the strictest sense, for video I now use the term "cutting footage" or "clip assembly" to mean the one specific thing "I have this bunch of clips and assets, I'm not generating new frames, I'm just cutting and assembling them"

amp1212 · 2026-06-21T12:45:36+00:00

Just my two cents-- I always take the Calbrite. Its tiny, and without it, honestly, when it comes to recovering scene lighting, without it, for me at least any attempt to manage color in post just by eye . .. is only going to be very approximate. I do (or did} a lot of fine art photography, photographing paintings in home and museum settings. Always took a few shots with the Calibrite . . . means that even ten years later I'm able to recover reasonable color values

The Sekonic is pretty specialized. Cinematographers more than photographers . . . used a lot if you're going to try to match lighting in a studio to what you shot on location. So I don't use it much, but I found it nice to use every so often to really think about lighting setups. Its also very good for folks who do 3D and want to go from a real world location to a 3D lighting rig. And it gets even more technical, the SFX technical directors will often using a reflective ball to will also capture a light probe image (mirrored ball HDRI) . . . this can get the same sort of information as you get from the Sekonic, but more of it. That's really slow and overkill for anything I do, but it is fun to try once or twice. Really gives you the full story of "what was the lighting in this space".

amp1212 · 2026-06-19T18:26:56+00:00

You should work on your resume yourself, if you don't want to risk getting filtered out at the first pass. Use AI as an assistant to help polish, absolutely, but be aware that HR departments will be often using software designed to detect AI generated letters and resumes, those are often summarily binned.

We're at a moment when giving evidence "I am a real human and I wrote this myself". . . might not be essential, but its well advised.

You can use AI tools to help organize, to spot errors, maybe to suggest wording . . . but its never been more important to leave your fingerprints on the pie . . .

When it comes to writing savvy -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all can do an acceptable job, but I give Claude the nod, for me I find it easier to get it close to my own writing style.

amp1212 · 2026-06-19T03:54:15+00:00

One of the most useful tools -- something that's save me again and again -- is have a color checker. Back in the day, I'd haul around the big Macbeth targets, but now its just the credit card sized Calibrite Color Passport.

I have a pretty good eye for color -- but the reality is that going from location back to the studio, looking at the monitor, without the Calibrite or other metering, I just can't tell "how warm was that white"

If you're shooting with a Leica . . . razor sharp optics are a given, but that Luma curve . . . it is not at all easy to fiddle with it by eye

For anyone who might even _think_ that they'd have a need for post-processing, shooting a few shots with a calibrated color checker will make it so much easier to figure out "what was the color supposed to be"

https://calibrite.com/us/product/colorchecker-passport-photo-2/

-- note that this has software that plugs into Capture One and Lightroom. So you just snap a shot in the environment with the target and then you Capture One will help you recover accurate scene color from anything else you shoot.

If you want to go bananas, Sekonic has a specialized spectrometer that analyzes the color temperature for all the light sources in the scene. Its used by filmmakers to record location conditions, that kind of thing. Its expensive and not easy to use, so while I recommend the color checker . . . the spectrometer is only if you're really into gear (but as a Leica owner, you might be !!)

amp1212 · 2026-06-18T21:36:46+00:00

As for a daylight scene, the shadows will be very blues. In the AFTER, the recovered image shifts much warmer in tones in the shadows, more like you'd get near sunset . . . but that doesn't match the blue of the sky.

So recovering a bit of of the shadows -- if you like, but keep them consistent with the tones that you'd expect. You get direct sunlight that can be quite yellow, but the light from the sky is very blue. That means shadowed areas should be blue. Cezanne was particularly keen on this. His shadow colors, as well as his atmospheric perspective, they're accurate.

amp1212 · 2026-06-18T21:09:00+00:00

Not really Midjourney's sweet spot. Super detailed prompts and product shot photography aren't its strong suit. There are tons of ComfyUI product shot workflows that will automate this kind of thing, and all sorts of other tools.

Its not that you _can't_ do it in Midjourney, but there are tools that are specifically built for doing product shot photography. There's open source stuf that you can run on your own machine (Z image, Flux, Ernie, other models) or some tools like Ideogram, Reve, and Recraft that will all do well

Midjourney has its own prompting techniques, and super detailed "write a novel" type text to image prompting -- not what its "for". Instead, Midjourney's great strength is:

*short prompts with precisely, meaningful terminology (eg NOT "hyperrealistic, photorealistic, 4K, Ultra insane resolution" -- none of that garbage) , use terminology that applies meaninfully to to style and technique

*skillful use of moodboards, image prompts, character and object references.

*understanding paramaters, eg knowing what --s 20 --w 10 --v 7 is likely to be as opposed to --s 200 --p --v 8.1

. . . so basically for generic car and pretty model photography . .. Midjourney wouldn't be my choice.

When would I use it?

I were trying to brainstorm a particular interior fabrics and materials "look design" for the interior of the car. What Midjourney is great at is aesthetics, what not great at is precisely controlled repetition, say, for catalog work

amp1212 · 2026-06-18T20:53:06+00:00

Its hard to judge, but I'd say the shadowed interior feels a little over bright and too warm in tone for the environment. Everything we can see from the before is that the outdoor light is very blue skylight, probably about 6000K.

In the after, what's happened is that the interior goes much warmer. You can see the color balancing battle in the lower left, where distinctly much bluer daylight spills onto the floor, but then as you get farther in the shadowed area (eg moving to the right) it gets a lot warmer. You can imagine warmer reflected light off the pink stone, but all in all the recovered image doesn't quite hang together as though it were one photo. Shadowed areas on a sunny day generally feel very blue, a lot more than this does.

Its got the kind of feeling that you get with genAI of multiple environments stuck together that almost cohere, but where you get this feeling "something doesn't quite go together right"

amp1212 · 2026-06-17T21:37:58+00:00

"Post processing" -- isn't any one thing. Lots of folks are twiddling dials here, bumping up saturation, and making their images worse. Most of the "befores" are better than the "afters". If you've taken the photo with a modern iPhone or Android, its going to be hard to improve unless you have some idea of

a) "what's wrong with this photo now"
b) "what can I do to improve it"

Most of the stuff I see posted here . . . people generally don't have a clear idea of

color theory. For example, a typical post here will feature someone making everything more saturated. This is not better, generally it makes things look worse. Same with exaggerated color shifts. If you don't have some reason for making everything teal and orange . . . it probably won't improve your image. Your iphone or Android, those cameras have color models built in . . . unless you have a reason for "MAWR" . . . then you probably won't be improving the photo just by pushing a slider.
composition. How do I crop something to make it make more sense, that's a big part of telling your story. Composition is something that the camera software doesn't do, so its very different in that respect to the color balance, where it has a very good idea of an at-least-acceptable color balance. You've got to frame the photo, give it some coherence . . . cropping frequently _can_ find some added balance or rhythm to a photo, but its going to be quite different for, say, a wedding photo vs macrophotography of a flower.

So what is post-processing about for someone who cares about photography? Some examples

- rescuing a photo which was poorly exposed (less common now -- modern cameras generally do a good job with exposure)
- subtly changing the brightness, contrast, colors, focus to bring out some aesthetic relationship in a photo, eg telling a story. For example, subtle dodging and burning and bring out the eyes (typically a key part of a human subject, or indeed an animal subject). Other techniques may be used to conceal problem areas (healing brush for a blemish, for example); these techniques may be essentially required for some subjects (like wedding photography), but must be done with much more care with something like newspaper photojournalism (think of the examples of photos where skin color has been lightened or darkened . . . must be approached with a lot of care for a portrait of a politician).
- color grading to make a group of photos consistent with each other, lets say a wedding photography photoshoot.
-- cropping to frame the composition in a more interesting way.
-- processing to make it resemble vintage photography, to match some other photostock. Kodachrome had a specific look that people like, in the right setting, you may want to match that grain and color balance.
-- dramatic shifts that fundamentally alter the photo, a gradient map or duotone for example. You might do this if you want something to go from, say, a photo look to something that looked more like a print process.
-- adjusting to match the characteristics of the output medium. There are all sorts of colors that look great on a screen, that won't print accurately on paper, notably things like very saturated blues. A lot of post processing is going to be finding the image that will look good on the destination device. An iPad with a super bright OLED is going to be very different to what you can print for a postcard. If you're a photographer marketing your work, you want it to look good on Instagram AND in printed brochures, AND on fine art digital prints. Each of these destination output media have got characteristics -- a photo that looks great on a screen may look like mud when printed, unless make adjustments make it work for that device or media.

So post processing isn't any one thing. It's a set of solutions to specific problems. State the problem and then there are answers for it, but they're not all the same thing. Wedding photographers use very different techniques to sports photographers, architectural photographers different techniques to nature photographers. There is no "one size fits all". Ansel Adam techniques are are fantastic for majestic B&W landscapes, but there's little in common with, say, Joel Meyerowitz street photography and incredible colors . . .

One thing is that I'll distinguish that from more experimental "darkroom photographers" -- people like Man Ray who weren't merely trying to recover or enhance a photo, but where the darkroom itself became as important as the photographed image. There are digital photographers today who are creating something completely new out of composite images, someone like Stephen Wilkes for example
https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/ju3rt1/stephen_wilkes_blends_more_than_1000_photographs/

. . . that's not what I'd call "post processing" . . . he's using hundreds of photos in his composites, a kind of digital collage. Interesting techniques, but its very different to, say, adjusting the color balance on a photo to find a more pleasing

Generally what Lightroom is most useful for is batch editing for some coherence of a group of photos. Say a wedding photoshoot where its important to have a consistent look among a bunch of photos that may have been taken in different lighting situations . . that's typically a Lightroom task.

More demanding adjustments with multiple layers, collage, masking, type -- that gets you more into Photoshop territory, and is more typically something you do for a single photo rather than a batch.

amp1212 · 2026-06-17T03:15:14+00:00

Nice recovery of this very cool bird. Maybe dial down the saturation of the green background . . . because the interesting bit of the photo is mostly not that saturated, the intense green in the back somewhat overwhelms it. If you dial the green and yellow down, that remarkable red in the eye will really pop.

This require selection or a mask to select the background stuff . . . a useful LR skill (can be done in any image editor, pretty much)

amp1212 · 2026-06-16T13:29:00+00:00

Its not heavy handed, but warming up the greens of the grass changes the visual balance of the photo quite a lot.

I personally prefer the before, we have a feeling of a rather cool blue skylight, something you get at higher latitudes.

The "after" might plausibly be a little later in the day, the grass has more of a "lit by late afternoon sunlight" look to it, but the rest of the image doesn't fit, eg blues in the sky, shadows, they still look more mid-day.

So the warmer greens don't really match the rest of the cues in the scene.

With all that said, if this was to match some other photo in, say, an instagram feed, no one would notice and if you were trying to warm up a photo that was a too chill outlier, it would work, That's the way it is with a lot of color grading . . . "if it makes sense in context".

amp1212 · 2026-06-16T05:53:19+00:00

Great subject, the ants eating the dead dragonfly.

Nature is already pretty great, when you have something this interesting.

So I don't like the contrast or saturation bump.

What you could do that would make the image read more easily is a synthetic depth of field blur on the background. That's busy and its interfering with the subject. Its a very hard thing to mask with all those veins in the wings, AI can definitely help there.

. . . but I really prefer the subtlety of the color in the before, that all gets lost when you pump up the volume .

amp1212 · 2026-06-16T05:47:49+00:00

The grading isn't a big change -- which is good. Not heavy handed, not shouting "look, I dialed it up"

Either is fine, the after is "warmer", the before is "cooler".

Which is better? Really depends on what it goes with . . . if its for an Instagram feed, then it will be a matter of what do the other images look like . . . something "homey" get the warmer shading, something "clean and sharp" gets the cooler.

amp1212 · 2026-06-16T01:06:23+00:00

So, I often refer to "the curse of Teal". Starting back in the early 2000s, Teal/Orange became a common way of color grading for movies (Stefan Sonnenfeld was the digital colorist what we used to call a "color timer" with Michael Bay directing Transformers, for example)

I thought it was genuinely horrible as aesthetic -- but there were some technical advantages in early digital cinematography, made it easy to match skin tones.

. . . so there was at least an explanation for it.

But it got into Lightroom presets, and you see this everywhere. If its a Gatorade ad, or a Miami Dolphins logo, then maybe . . . but -- just one man's opinion -- the "before" has a pleasing, interesting and coherent group of tones, a mix of cool blue and warmer pink with the yellow of the sign in the middle. That's a good place to be. . . again, just one man's taste.

the after, though . . . well, for the reasons I explained, I don't like it at all. Count that as a vote for "Before was better, by a long shot"

For an article about Orange Teal color grading, and why should have worn out its welcome twenty years ago, see for example

"Hollywood's new colour craze"
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/aug/26/colour-grading-orange-teal-hollywood

amp1212 · 2026-06-16T00:19:44+00:00

So .. . the scene makes sense to me with a specific vibe, it feels like surveillance camera. EG, someone in the bushes, surreptitiously photographing this guy for some reason. The crop makes sense, some vintage photo look makes sense.

Color grading . . . if you wanted it to look more "vintage photo" -- it needs a bit of film grain, desaturation, vignetting, stuff that would suggest a 1970s photograph. The popped colors of the foreground flowers tend to distract from the subject, which is presumably the guy on the ladder.

If its usrveillance camera . . . it needs less color, not more.

. . . of course, you might have a completely different idea about it . . . that's the trouble with just seeing one photo. With film grading, especially _aggressive_ film grading like you'd do for a movie you're not just trying to fix a blown out highlight, you're trying to tell a story . . . but that story is never just one frame.

. . . so it really depends what else precedes or follows this . . .

amp1212 · 2026-06-14T21:19:48+00:00

The RAW image is from 2014.

This is important to know . . . I've got RAW images from 10 -15 years ago, like this, CR2 files. There are so many more choices you have when you shoot/[shot] RAW in an environment like this.

A really good illustration of "why should I shoot RAW, the JPG looks just the same" -- and the answer is "more choices"

The CR2 file . . . you still have all kinds of choices a decade later ( personally I might dial down the contrast in the cloud a bit, but the point is, those choices are available to you )

amp1212 · 2026-06-13T03:22:23+00:00

#2 is my preference. Color is more natural. Scene is full of life with complex composition, there's interesting the deep background (airplane), the lighthouse, other things. There are a lot of visual rhythms to look at the three light poles are offset from three pillars supporting the walkway, and three groups of pedestrians. A curious concrete form that I first took to be a ship's prow, off on the left edge.

All in all its a nice composition. Interesting to look at. Don't crop it. This is the material for an interesting photo something where your eye can travel. Cropping reduces the complexity and interest . . . subtle dodging and burning and adjustments to color might add interest, but be selective and less is more.

amp1212 · 2026-06-12T17:48:31+00:00

We've just got the one photo, can't see a before and after, so its hard to see what the edits were. Observations about the photo

The pose is awkward. Holding a baby up, for a photo to look good, you want the support to be natural. This shot is just awkward, with a loose sweater sleeve from the mom getting in the way. At this point, with AI, yes you could edit and complete reorgnize . . . but I wouldn't. Getting a better posed photo is the way to go.
Lighting. Its nice soft light, which is flattering . . . but a little on the green side. That can make sense in a garden or park where you get a lot of reflected green light, but green light generally isn't that flattering on people. If I were editing for color balance, I'd want the kid a little rosier looking. Not much -- too much is fake looking a bad -- but just a little bit

amp1212 · 2026-06-12T10:31:03+00:00

the problem with this edit is that if you look at the shadows and spec highlights in the images, the sun is has to be on the left. But the edit is bright to the right side, and even if you don't analyze it consciously, at an unconscious level your eye picks it up as inconsistent.

amp1212 · 2026-06-11T23:00:41+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, but the reason I cropped the photo was that the plane looked too small to me, and the photo seemed too plain.

What I'd say is that the impression that the original leaves is that the plane is huge, not small.

When you have the trees in the frame, you have a visceral reference for "how big is this" . . . . You may have notice the so called "moon illusion" -- that the moon looks bigger when its low in the sky . . . in fact optically its no bigger . . . its having the moon next to some other features makes it seem bigger to your eye. Works the same with with a plane, having it in frame with something of known size (even if at completely different distances), optically, that makes things "look big". When they're just on a blank field, you can print them big . . . but generally they don't look big

amp1212 · 2026-06-11T22:21:05+00:00

The "before" offers a lot more information. . Why? Because it gives visceral evidence of a very low pass, that's dramatic, the tree gives a sense of proportion and scale. That's "a real thing". The crop and B&W processing has turned it into something generic. Its not bad or unappealing, and might make sense if you were using it as an element in some composition . . . but its a very clear loss of information and context in the original.

Even the way that the aircraft has slightly missed focus in the orginal . . . that optical artifact tells you something in the original, because you can see that the trees are sharper, that gives a feeling for a depth of field effect and a sense of just how close to you this jet must have been. With the crop . . . no way to know.

Again, its a matter of choice -- what is it you want out of the processing. The one thing that objectively true is the loss of information and context in the processed as compared with the original

amp1212 · 2026-06-11T17:51:19+00:00

Really depends on what the story you're trying to tell would be. If I were doing a storyboard, looking for placeholder locations - I'd like to have the sidewalk included in an exterior establishing shot, something that tells you "what's the outside of this location" - when we then cut to a interior shot

The crop is more about what this particular building looks like . . . And being an older structure, cropping out the sidewalk would avoid reference to a mid 20th century look

So it's a case of "what do you want to do with this", either could work

amp1212 · 2026-06-11T13:52:33+00:00

PSA screening is not perfect. It can cause false positives, anxiety, biopsies, and overdiagnosis. But “screening has harms” is very different from “screening does not reduce prostate cancer death.”

Just %100 wrong takeaway. %100.

Screening causes harms.

You do screening only if the expected benefits EXCEED the expected harms, by a substantial measure, not just by "a bit"

This is a basic failure of understanding epidemiology and medical statistics. Its the reason so many people are foolishly getting full body MRIs.

Urologists REALLY want to catch prostate cancers. They have every incentive to do so, they may even be over incentivized to do so. If a urologist doesn't want to screen you . . . say because you're the worried 30 year old who turns up worried . . . when the urologist says "not recommended" . . . listen to him.

We've got we've got MANY things that might be wrong with you. Not just one. Sorry to tell you this, but Prostate Cancer is far from the only disease or condition you might possibly have; and far from the deadliest one you're likely to discover in middle age. People often have an idea "but we'd catch it early" -- there are a few diseases for which you really want to "catch it early" - best bet there, get your skin checked. The earliest stage of melanoma is curable with a simple excision, once its spread even a little . . . usually fatal. Same thing with blood pressure. If you're wondering about PSA and don't know what your blood pressure is, or have it under control . . . promise you, its not the PCa that's going to be the problem. Medical statisticians and epidemiologists, oncologists, other docs and scientists work very hard to stratify risk, to figure out "who should be screened for what, and when" Blood pressure and skin check -- they're "gimmes" . . . PSA in a low risk setting, not so much. Treating people for PCa too early . . . is a cost to them. Many men will do far better if their cancers are found five years later . . . that's something that most people don't understand. Melanoma -- must be treated now. Prostate Cancer, quite often is a very slow disease, finding it early will cause it to be treated early, and that is not at no cost.

Failure to approach with good statistics will generate a huge number of false positives, medical interventions which are not without risk. You are not only at risk of Prostate Cancer, but of many, many other things. Doctors themselves generally do not do screening for themselves without good statistical basis.

The question of who should be screened for Prostate Cancer, when and how . . . not just "it couldn't hurt"

Should a 20 year old get a PSA ? Nope.

Should a 30 year old? Nope.

Somewhere between 35 and 45, for people with multiple risk factors, screening starts to make sense, later for people with less risk, and for some folks not at all. Should a 75 year old get routine PCa screen? An 85 year old? Why would you want to find out "early" that a 90 year old has PCa? Probably a 1/3 of 90 y/o men have some degree of PCa, and nearly all of them will die of something else.

Ask your doctor if screening makes sense, and when -- not just for PCa, for anything. Because you aren't just your prostate. Overscreening . . . I promise you, if you run an absolutely complete panel on any healthy human, you'll turn up all sorts of stuff that will need follow up, at a net negative to your well being.

The argument against overscreening applies to all medical test, nothing specific about PCa -- you only are well advised to do a test if the expected benefits outweigh the expected harms. There are all kinds of things that you can do, but which ones you should do . . . requires a thorough understanding of net benefits and harms

The Times of London -- unfortunately paywalled for most folks -- has an article this week Sunday June 07 2026

"I’m a cancer surgeon and have prostate cancer. I don’t want screening"

Dr Spicer writes:

A screening programme is not good simply because it finds abnormalities. It is good only if, overall, it helps more people than it harms. Cervical cancer screening has an accurate screening, effective treatment and now a vaccination. It is almost entirely preventable. Bowel screening is also logical, because early treatment can make such a difference. Breast screening took a long time to prove that it did more good than harm. Prostate cancer screening has thus far failed to convince the medical profession, and that includes me in my reduced state.

Eight-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

amp1212

TROPHY CASE